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IT Technology

DuckDuckGo Surpasses 100 Million Daily Search Queries For the First Time (zdnet.com) 39

Posted by msmash from the moving-forward dept.
Privacy-focused search engine DuckDuckGo reached a major milestone in its 12-year-old history last week when it recorded on Monday its first-ever day with more than 100 million user search queries. From a report: The achievement comes after a period of sustained growth the company has been seeing for the past two years, and especially since August 2020, when the search engine began seeing more than 2 billion search queries a month on a regular basis. The numbers are small in comparison to Google's 5 billion daily search queries but it's a positive sign that users are looking for alternatives. DuckDuckGo's popularity comes after the search engine has expanded beyond its own site and now currently offers mobile apps for Android and iOS, but also a dedicated Chrome extension. More than 4 million users installed these apps and extension, the company said in a tweet in September 2020.

DuckDuckGo Surpasses 100 Million Daily Search Queries For the First Time More | Reply

DuckDuckGo Surpasses 100 Million Daily Search Queries For the First Time

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  • Better results (Score:5, Interesting)

    by KimDotOrg ( 7630658 ) on Monday January 18, 2021 @09:59AM (#60959678)
    I don't use DDG for the better privacy, but for the better results. On woke topics, google steers me in the woke direction, while DuckDuckGo gives results offering a more balanced viewpoint.
    • I get identical results between DDG and Bing. They're the same engine but different brands.

      Image search is also just about identical, and I'm kind of fed up with Bing/DDG returning 80% YouTube video links in the image searches. Looks like all the DDG/Bing searches are filtered through Google SafeSearch, so whatever Google deems verboten affects all these engines. Can anyone confirm this?

      • I get identical results between DDG and Bing. They're the same engine but different brands.

        If you want the same results as Google but with extra privacy, you can use Startpage.com [startpage.com].

    • Re:Better results (Score:5, Interesting)

      by sinij ( 911942 ) on Monday January 18, 2021 @10:08AM (#60959724)

      On woke topics, google steers me in the woke direction, while DuckDuckGo gives results offering a more balanced viewpoint.

      I noticed the same poisoning of the Google search terms on many political and COVID topics. This is considering that I take effort to wipe all tracking, so you can't even attribute skewed result to the previous search history.

      • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

        by ArchieBunker ( 132337 )

        Dear google, please return only search results that tell me what I want to hear.

        • Re: (Score:2, Troll)

          by sinij ( 911942 )

          Dear google, please return only search results that tell me what I want to hear.

          How would you explain DuckDuckGo presenting additional search hits that Google does not have? It is very clear that Google is suppressing search results.

    • Did you know that Google bases its result sorting on the area you're in, time of day, day of the week, etc... And of course on what you did in the past, including e-mails.
      And it has a really hard time telling pro from contra or recognizing sarcasm. (Meaning it completely fails.)

      So can I guess you're living in a very woke area, maybe share your wifi or computers with woke people, or lookd up many sites regarding that topic but with a different polarity?

      I found disabling ALL the "personalization" gets rid of

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by sinij ( 911942 )
        You are probably right, it just occurred to me that my ISP terminates in a very woke area. Aside from that, I make effort to not be tracked by Google. Combining these two, it probably defaults to some location-based profile. Sigh.

    • Re:Better results (Score:5, Informative)

      by Anubis IV ( 1279820 ) on Monday January 18, 2021 @10:46AM (#60959900)

      I don't use DDG for the better privacy, but for the better results.

      Relatedly, DDG's biggest advantage to me is its support for bangs [duckduckgo.com]. if I want to check what the critical consensus is for The Mandalorian, I can type "!rt Mandalorian" into my search bar on any device to immediately jump to the Rotten Tomatoes results for the search term. I use it all the time when I know I want to go straight to StackOverflow (!so), check for used products (!ebay), look up who that actor was in that movie (!imdb), read up on a subject on Wikipedia (!w), pull up something on Amazon (!a), and the list goes on and on. It makes the bulk of the searches I do so much easier.

      DDG even provides a !g for those times when you think you might have more luck with Google (as well as !gi for Google Images, !gm for Google Maps, etc. if you aren't finding the results you thought you would).

      And that's before we get to the privacy benefits, such as permitting POST instead of GET for submitting search terms, removing search terms from link referrals (i.e. keeping sites from knowing what you searched for), having default settings that protect users against the privacy implications of embedded content from places like YouTube (though you can choose to enable embedded content if you trust those sites), and so on.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        What is the advantage of doing that over just using the browser's built in feature? Both Firefox and Chrome support it natively. Seems like your way of doing it pings DDG every time you use it.

        • If you're willing to put in the time, your approach is arguably better in some ways, sure, but it takes manual effort to add each site, whereas bangs provide tens of thousands with zero effort. Instead of requiring setup that I either need to do in each browser or sync to each browser, bangs work whether I'm using Brave at my computer, Safari on my phone, Firefox on my wife's laptop, or Chrome when troubleshooting my parents' computers.

          But if pinging DDG is the concern, you can find extensions that will do

    • Doesn't chrome ship everything you put into the omni bar to google? and all your bookmarks?
      I'm pretty sure it also uses the google DNS no matter what your settings are. I once misconfigured my system wide DNS but chrome kept working.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      If you are relying on a search engine to give you a balanced overview of a controversial topic then you are doing it wrong.

      Do you imagine that someone at DDG has carefully selected search results for your terms to make sure you aren't mislead? Or that their algo is smart enough to understand the subtleties of what it is reading and give you a balanced selection?

      At best every search engine's result just reflects the biases of the people who decide what "good results" means. At worst they give you the most he

    • Is that just because work tends to be a more mainstream popular viewpoint right now or do you think it's some sinister reason? When you have dozens of the largest companies running those kind of messages or trying to appear like they care about it, it's hardly surprising it shows up more. Maybe that's just a fault in Google's algorithms, but expecting any algorithms to be able to accomplish something like a perfect perspective balance when humans can't even agree with what that is seems to be nigh on imposs
    • I figure if I can't find it on Duck Duck go, it isn't worth it because I would have to go through a ton of google links that have no connection to what I was looking for anyway.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by gchat ( 747883 )
      Absolutely right. I was one of the first who used google when it was still an university project but for the last couple of months I use exclusively DDG and I'm very happy with its results. This wokeness of google has really gotten out of hands (among other things). One of many example which makes it quite obvious:
      Just type "men can" and watch the autocomplete magic happen... For those who are to lazy to try out out themselves, the results are:
      Man can have periods
      Man can lactate
      Men can get pregnant
      ...
    • agreed. google tends to be spammy for obscure stuff. long time ago i was looking for galculator manual, but google insisted it was calculator - how thoughtful. tried ddg, it found me a souceforge (galculator's site) link

  • Is there a way to measure index completeness? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by BAReFO0t ( 6240524 ) on Monday January 18, 2021 @10:11AM (#60959736)

    E.g. how much does their index contain, compared to Google?

    (To be fair: Compared to what Google would see, if it didn't spy on literally all e-mails and everything else that should be private.)

    I mean with actual numbers. Not "It feels about as complete / less complete.".

    Asked in another way: What stops DDG from crawling just as much of the web as Google? (Again, given the above caveat.)

    I figure the only difference is goingnm to be people actively telling Google that their site exists, and actively checking it's in the index... but not DDG.

    And I feel that it was an error in the design of the web and DNS, to not have a central (well, shared) index, and making it mandatory to offer a complete crawling index of what should be publicly available, if you want to register a domain. (You could still choose to offer an empty index if nothing should be found.)
    Something legislation could easily fix, killing any search engine's index dominance, and letting them focus on the quality of the actual search. (Matching your input to index entries. And presentation.)

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Completeness is only one metric, another important one is how up to date the index is. Results appear on Google within minutes or even seconds of going up, very handy for following current events or not getting bad links to sites that have removed the content you were looking for.

      Having sites offer their own crawling index is a bad idea. They will just lie to get clicks. The law is irrelevant, they will locate themselves out of your jurisdiction, if you can even find out who the owners are.

    • ...and making it mandatory to offer a complete crawling index of what should be publicly available, if you want to register a domain.

      That would be a nightmare. If the index were only required for registration, it would soon become obsolete. If the index had to be kept up to date it would be a huge make-work project. How would the requirement be enforced?

    • Why are you pushing a centralized internet? It is supposed to be the exact opposite.

      Granted, it has not worked out that way, but the ideal is still sound.

    • Is there a way to measure index completeness?

      Kinda, but not really.

      I did my graduate research in this field back in the mid-to-late 2000s (my research group did the then-largest web crawl in academia, with an index roughly 20% the size of Google's at the time). I'm sure things have changed in the last decade, but my recollection is that we were putting more focus on metrics like pages crawled, sites crawled, and a variety of metrics for the freshness of an index, rather than anything resembling "completeness". We did measure how many pages we crawled

  • No captchas (Score:5, Interesting)

    by jeromef ( 2726837 ) on Monday January 18, 2021 @10:42AM (#60959876)
    I almost always need to complete one or several captcha(s) whenever I use Google search over a VPN. Not with DDG. I have now completely switched to Firefox + DDG + uBlock origin on all the platforms I'm using (Linux, MacOS X, Windows, Android) and I'm quite happy with that.

  • No Doodles! (Score:3)

    by Tempest_2084 ( 605915 ) on Monday January 18, 2021 @11:11AM (#60960008)
    One thing I like about DDG is that it doesn't have those stupid doodles. There was a time when they were the rare cute little picture about something important(ish). But now they're constant, animated, or worse pulsing because they want to click on it. I've had to use an ad blocker to block them because I find them highly distracting and obnoxious. I'm also curious as to how they come up with the people they highlight in them. Half the time I'm saying to myself "who?" or "okay, but why?" when I see them.

  • DDG sadly getting worse (Score:4, Insightful)

    by jandoe ( 6400032 ) on Monday January 18, 2021 @11:37AM (#60960138)

    I have DDG as default search engine on all my devices and it will never change but I have to say that last months I see me double checking google more and more often. DDG works as a front end for youtube, wikipedia and most of the times for technical searches but for many topics it's absolute garbage. For example, the other day I was looking for Covid emergency number in my town. I go to DDG:
    https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab... [duckduckgo.com]
    first link is from Mexico, there are some pages about restrictions and no phone number for my town. Now google:
    https://www.google.com/?q=nume... [google.com]
    The first result is exactly what I'm looking for, thank you. And that while being logged out and with cookies cleared after every search.
    I value privacy and I'm willing to search twice from time to time so I'm not going back to google as default search but it's really hard to convince other people to use it which results this bad.

    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by Rockoon ( 1252108 )

      For example, the other day I was looking for Covid emergency number in my town.

      ...and the search engine that isnt tracking you had a problem with that? You dont say.

      You sir, are a Brainiac.

    • For most searches, DDG is fine. On any topic that could attract paid search placement, Google is terrible - it's all commercial websites, where DDG will get you informative articles. For localization (phone number of the restaurant around the corner), Google is better.

      I start with DDG, and use Google only if necessary.

    • I have DDG as default search engine on all my devices and it will never change but I have to say that last months I see me double checking google more and more often. DDG works as a front end for youtube, wikipedia and most of the times for technical searches but for many topics it's absolute garbage. For example, the other day I was looking for Covid emergency number in my town. I go to DDG: https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab... [duckduckgo.com] first link is from Mexico, there are some pages about restrictions and no phone number for my town. Now google: https://www.google.com/?q=nume... [google.com] The first result is exactly what I'm looking for, thank you. And that while being logged out and with cookies cleared after every search. I value privacy and I'm willing to search twice from time to time so I'm not going back to google as default search but it's really hard to convince other people to use it which results this bad.

      Bingo. I don't use DDG except for simple things (wikipedia, youtube, imdb front end.) Anything more complicated or "semantic", then it's google (or bing.)

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by trawg ( 308495 )

      Same problem here - the biggest issue I have is location sensitive results. Google hands down wins here by miles. I suspect part of it is the usual American bias (I'm in Australia) where more popular search results are overriding my local ones, but I also attribute a big part of it to the fact that (in theory) DDG doesn't know where I am or where I live. Unlike Google which knows my home and work addresses (thanks Google Maps) and my current location and travel history (thanks Location Services), and of cou

  • That "free lunch" with Google can be really tasty. The more info they have on you, the more the results chime with what you are searching for.
    The creepy side of that is when you start typing something and auto-fill completes it for you ... WTF?

    I mean, it's crazy useful, but you just know it is driven by what Google knows about YOU - that's the price you pay for accurate results.
    But, on the flipside, doesn't that mean it just brings up results that match how you are profiled and you miss a bunch of hits in t

  • Firefox (Score:4, Interesting)

    by labnet ( 457441 ) on Monday January 18, 2021 @03:30PM (#60961160)

    I’ve noticed fresh installs of Firefox are defaulting DDG. That will certainly help adoption.

  • I wonder how DDG will eventually be evil? Not sure if /s

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