Some nice momentum for privacy-focused search engine DuckDuckGo which has just announced it’s hit 30 million daily searches a year after reaching 20M – a year-on-year increase of 50%.
Hitting the first 10M daily searches took the search engine a full seven years, and then it was another two to get to 20M. So as growth curves go it must have required patience and a little faith in the run up.
I switched from Google to DDG as well, and only use the !g command whenever I feel DDG isn’t giving me the search result I’m looking for. These days, virtually every browser supports DDG as well, making it possible to search using the address bar and similar functionality like that. I don’t really miss Google Search in my day-to-day use.
And as a multilingual person and translator, DDG has one feature that has made my life a lot easier. Sometimes I need to search in English, and sometimes I need to search in Dutch. Years and years ago, you could go to Google.nl for Dutch search results, and Google.com for English results. At some point in the recent past, Google decided to remove this functionality, forcing users into one language and making it incredibly cumbersome to search in other languages.
DDG, on the other hand, has this incredibly handy little toggle atop the search results that allows me to instantly switch between Dutch and English results, without even having to change the search query. Clicking on the downward triangle next to it allows me to pick other languages as well. This handy little feature is an absolute lifesaver, and I can’t imagine using online search functionality without it.
DDG is fantastic. It’s !bangs are so iseful, i find myself searching for everything through DDG
Huge fan of DuckDuckGo, I’ve been using it exclusively for something close to ten years now. The times where I’ve had to ask it to search something else for me (usually Google, admittedly… their spider is faster, I think, or has more concurrency) has trended to zero for ages now.
At my nephew’s primary school they have classes about how to stay safe online. They get taught about online profiling and I was fascinated to discover that the teachers recommend DDG as part of this.
It’s great to see DDG being so successful, and I take it as a sign that people really do take privacy seriously after all. Success comes with its own dangers of course, so I hope DDG is able to stick firmly to its privacy line as it grows.
Too bad it’s still mostly garbage for technical searches. For day-to-day searches it does well enough, but to track down specific error codes and the like, not so much.
I’ve been using DDG for about six years or so now for technical searches without any problems. Half my searches are probably for technical issues and DDG has been good for that.
Same here.
Yeah, and they include much better searches than google does for everything technical that I’ve looked up. Love DDG.
Apparantly Google does 3.5 billion searches per day, so DDG is about 1% of Google.
DDG is now doing about the same amount of searches per day as Google did in 2001.
The last time Google grew at the rate of DDG was 10 years ago.
http://www.internetlivestats.com/google-search-statistics/
Unrelated, but the strangest statistic from that site is that “Google crawls 20 billion sites a day, and processes 3.3 billion searches per day”. So for every single search that is performed an entire site gets crawled 6 times? That seems excessive
That 1% is 1% less data got the monster that Google has become. Insignificant? On the grand scheme of things it is but for those who want to limit the amount that Google gets to know about you and your life it is significant.
Google is Evil and its all seeing all data sucking AI needs to be starved of as much data as possible.
The real question is when will DDG be bigger than Bing…
My experience with DDG is not very postive. Search results are just okay. I recently switched to qwant and I don’t miss DDG in any way.
Even better than Qwant / DuckDuckGo is the prospect of indexing the web through participation in a community project like YaCy.
Check out Susper, a familiar-looking front end to the YaCy web index: https://susper.com/search?query=osnews
Hi,
I also use startpage.com / ixquick.com (made in holland Tom!) and swisscows.ch.
YaCe is new to me and seems the way to go, I will try and promote.
Thanks for this article!
I like the language switch feature. It is really irritating when Google only provides me with whatever is available in my language (Spanish, in my case) when I know that in English, or French, or Italian would give me much better results. You can try to force it by writing more long-winded searches that are obviously in another language, but success is hit or miss.
Oh, and the privacy!