DuckDuckGo has exploded in popularity since the federal government’s surveillance program came to light two years ago. Remember the privacy-minded search engine’s best week ever?
The service has grown 600 percent since then, DuckDuckGo CEO Gabe Weinberg said on CNBC.
And deservedly so.
I switched to it recently. It is just cleaner and simpler than Google has become.
Y’know what I don’t need on a search page? Live results as I type. Y’know what I don’t need? Google Plus integration. I don’t need snooping on. I don’t need overbearing ads and I don’t need my Google search to be a shopping search.
Here’s a great example: type in ‘domino’ to both search engines.
Google returns a giant advert for Dominos Pizza. I have to scroll down over a page and a half to get to the first none-Domino’s Pizza bit of the page. Even against the actual search results, Domino’s Pizza continues its giant ad alongside it consuming half the page width.
DDG returns a list of useful things – a definition for the word, the pizza place, a famous singer with the name, a bunch of songs/albums with it in the name, and 44 other ‘domino’ things in a nice compact scrollable bar. The search results start half way down my screen and are completely un-intruded upon.
Are you sure pizza is not what most of people want when they search for Domino? As I type after “domino” “ga” of even “g”, the instant results change for the game. And if instead of google.com I use the local google.ro (which they push as a default instead of my will), front page results are a mix: singer, pizza, game, movie.
600% growth means nothing without actual concrete numbers. For all we know, they had 1 user previously and now have 6, whereas 1 million to 6 million is quite a jump. It’s all about context.
This is the only website I’ve ever seen DDG mentioned, so I suspect it isn’t all that popular.
Troll or living under a rock?
Neither, just never heard it mentioned out of this website.
That’s an anecdotal fallacy. “I’ve never seen a red cellphone, therefore red cellphones don’t exist.”
In other words, your narrow viewpoint has no bearing on reality.
That doesn’t take away from the point though. 600% is a meaningless number unless you know the actual numbers it represents.
I said “I suspect” based on my own experience. I didn’t state it as a fact for all.
My mother-in-law has a red cell phone. I’ve seen it (I bought it for her). Therefore, I know it exists. You, on the other hand, I’ve never seen…
You’re on to me; I’m a figment of your imagination. So much for that secret identity…
Actually a red Blackberry Passport lives in my dreams; but I was not able to buy it
Let me Google (or Duck Duck Go) it for you:
http://www.ebizmba.com/articles/search-engines
http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/https://duckduckgo.com
http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/duckduckgo.com
http://duckduckgo.com/traffic.html
https://duckduckgo.com/traffic.html
Hits are meaningless and easily faked lol
I mentioned this before with no response, is there any reason osnews is using user agent strings to redirect some web crawlers the mobile site instead of the desktop site? This is annoying for users like myself who actually prefer to use DDG over google (which gets the desktop version).
For example:
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=osnews+The+peculiar+history+of+the+Windows…
Brings up:
http://mobile.osnews.com/story.php/28632/The_peculiar_history_of_th…
Based on the behavior I see the site is running some kind of server module (its looks like its Apache so its probably mod_rewrite) that redirects traffic to the mobile site based on the user agent string. I’m guessing if it can’t identify the UA it defaults it to the mobile site.
DDG uses a bunch of different crawlers, so depending on which one is being used the UA may vary… Anyway, long story short the user agent string is not being identified correctly.
But I always end up back on Google.
I have been using it for months as a default search engine but… I find myself more often than not searching on Google.
I am in the same position as you. For my computer I must use Google to get relevant results. But on my iPad DDG is good enough.
It is kind of like going back in time. Duck Duck is like Google circa 2001, when I thought people were crazy for using it over something like hotbot.
Startpage is one.
https://startpage.com
I found it to be quicker than DDG
I used DDG right up until they started adding the same slow loading scripttardery that makes me increasingly hate ALL websites since they piss away functionality and accessibility in the name of “gee ain’t it neat” garbage I don’t want.
Their original concept of clean simple search is long gone, said duck duck having gone the way of the dodo. They’ve horribly neglected their scripting off version of the site, they’ve embraced the HTML 5-tard BS for no legitimate reason, the people currently working on the templates don’t seem to know enough
Which sadly makes it the EXACT SAME CRAP that killed off “jeeves” ages ago that EVERY BLASTED SEARCH is now pissing their own beds with.
Since I’m not in the tinfoil hat crowd the “privacy” thing doesn’t make me rage against the man like others. That means if it’s going to be bloated slow loading scripttard bull, what makes it any better a choice than Google, Bing, StartPage, Yahoo, whatever?
ALL of these search engines have lost sight of what’s important — delivering content to users — for scripttard BS, framework asshattery, and generally pissing away accessibility and flat out IGNORING web standards; laughably in the case of some while claiming to be promoting them. Yes Google, I’m looking at you!
Jokers vomiting up the code for these sites need a SERIOUS sit-down with the WCAG and to spend some time reading about usability over on NNGroup’s website. They wouldn’t know semantics, accessibility, or functionality if it bit them in the ass.
Just look at their home page — apart from developer ineptitude what possible excuse could there be for that to be wasting 714k in 7 files for? The typical result page delivering a mere 8.5k of plaintext and nothing I’d even consider a content image is a ridiculous 750k in 25 files! Scripttard bloat, nothing resembling semantics, and a complete ignorance of what HTML is, what it is for, and how to use it!!!
Edited 2015-06-18 10:04 UTC
https://duckduckgo.com/html
Incomplete form, inline-level tag wrapping block level tag in 4 strict, static CSS in the markup, comment placements that could trip rednering bugs in legacy browsers (you know, the type of places people might use the non JS version), clearing DIV like it’s still 2003, no media targets for the screen layout CSS, restricting the maximum zoom in the viewport meta (WHY THE *** DO PEOPLE DICK WITH THAT?!?), 7 validation errors in a document that shouldn’t even have that many lines…
… and that’s just the big empty page with a search box.
What part of “horribly neglected their scripting off version” did you miss? To be brutally frank that’s such a mess that whoever’s writing it has NO DAMNED BUSINESS MAKING WEBSITES!!!
Developer ineptitude doesn’t even begin to cover it… and that’s BEFORE we even get to the laundry list of how not to build a website that is the results page — that’s so ineptly developed it’s probably costing them more to host than it should… as made plain by their wasting 40 to 75k of markup (depending on the result set) to deliver 7k of plaintext and nothing I’d waste time even bothering putting in there as a content images. (the favicons are cute, but a tiny little waste in that role)… basically anywhere from three to five times the amount of markup as should have been used.
I love DGG’s intentions and use it from time to time.
What bothers me, though, is that the search ranking is really really bad at times. Just try searching for a combination of technical terms and compare against Google. The data-collecting-evil-dudes over at Mountain View clearly does ranking better, and crawl a much much larger number of sites and pages. I’ve also found that DDG opts out early on dynamically generated pages, leaving just ingress available for indexing and ranking. Google does this much better. Which is unfortunate…
If you want Google’s results but without a search bubble or tracking, try startpage.com. I did the same search, “angular vs meteor” (don’t ask) in DuckDuckGo, Google, and StartPage, using a private browsing session. The Google and StartPage results matched exactly. Screenshots below:
DDG: http://i.imgur.com/FcA2LqH.png
Google: http://i.imgur.com/LXeVZUK.png
StartPage: http://i.imgur.com/g5cuajA.png
https://duckduckgo.com/traffic.html
they post there traffic you can look;
looks like they went from arround 2million queries a day to 7 millions queries a day.
Hey, it looks like they finally managed to work around a long-standing bug (not of their own making, stemming from issues with their sources) that resulted in it ignoring or changing some search terms. My two test cases in DDG for this issue are now much improved:
> obnam mount
Used to return a bunch of totally wrong results about “Mount Obama”, but now is correctly giving me results about how to mount Obnam (OSS backup software) repos.
> vultr review
Used to return a bunch of junk results about “vulture”, and even “vault”, instead of the VPS provider “Vultr”. Now they’re all mostly relevant.
What have your experiences been with DDG’s indexing speed? For me this is still the major shortcoming. For example, today I searched for information about the new Librem 13 laptop, and it only returned results about the Librem 15. (Admittedly, Google’s results weren’t very good for this query either, but at least the 3rd results was for puri.sm/librem-13).
Another minor annoyance is when searching for bugs reports by their number. DDG still doesn’t find bugs by their report number, whereas Google does. Compare:
– https://duckduckgo.com/?q=kde+bug+320059
– https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&q=kde%20bug%203210…