DuckDuckGo grew more than 70% this year

&gt; “Our biggest challenge is that most people have not heard of us,” Weinberg says. “We very much want to break out into the mainstream.”<p>It won&#x27;t help at all if more people get to know of DDG and then leave it after a single trial because the results are not great.<p>I value privacy a lot and want something like DDG to succeed and become really big, but I get frustrated very often with DDG. I know many people are very happy with the results from DDG. For <i>most of my searches</i> though (on technical and other matters), I end up doing a second search on Start Page or Google because DDG still does not have search by date and the search results are nowhere close to Google.<p>I do have and use DDG as my default search engine in the hope that DDG keeps analyzing the volume of !s or !g queries as an indicator of how much DDG is lacking and takes action to improve it.

Most of the comments here are complaining that, while people like the idea of DDG, the search results are poor. Two comments regarding that:<p>1) the only way DDG is going to improve search results is by you using it regularly. Using it regularly drives not only revenue, allowing them to hire additional developers, but it also drives feedback to help DDG improve search results.<p>2) I suspect that the difference in search results may partly be conditioned responses. We are accustomed to what we find through Google, so when DDG presents something that looks different (e.g. showing a different answers site that has the exact same result), we feel uncomfortable and think it&#x27;s not what we want. I think this is just something that takes time to adjust to, but also something DDG needs to think about how try to figure out how to overcome.

I&#x27;m trying to use DuckDuckGo, but for now the local search results are really, really poor. I can&#x27;t blame them much though, because Yahoo and Bing suck as well. But then Bing&#x27;s index is in fact the only competition Google has and DuckDuckGo cannot improve as long as they depend on Bing.<p>One favorite example that I&#x27;ve been using for feedback is when I&#x27;m searching for &quot;restaurante&quot; (the Romanian word for &quot;restaurants&quot;), in Google Search I&#x27;m getting links to nearby restaurants. Which is normal since they&#x27;ve got my location and so on. But they also know that in my country (Romania) the people are speaking Romanian and so they are showing me results in the Romanian language of restaurants from my city.<p>On the other hand in DuckDuckGo:<p>1. The instant answer is terribly wrong, mistakenly identifying a plain vocabulary word from at least 3 romance languages (!!!) as being the name of some insignificant 1-star GitHub project that nobody cares about. Ouch!<p>2. Even though the region selected is Romania, aproximately the first eleven results contain the translation of the word &quot;restaurante&quot; from Spanish, a link to some &quot;el Restaurante&quot; magazine I&#x27;ve never heard about and a link to some latin restaurant named Kuuk from Mexico, plus a &quot;Top 10 Berlin Restaurants&quot; (needless to say Berlin is not in Romania)<p>3. Out of 30 links I get, none of them is related to Romanian restaurants, Romanian cuisine, or anything related to Romania, even though the selected region is Romania and that word is a Romanian word.<p>4. OK, lets assume that some users searching for &quot;restaurante&quot; are interested in Spanish results. Well, one problem would be that Mexico is different from Spain, but lets ignore that as well. The biggest problem is that this set of results is completely useless for Spanish speakers as well.

DDG has been my search engine of choice for the past few years and in my experience it is pretty rare that I have to use google for better results. In general I&#x27;m quite happy with it.<p>One thing I would love to see as a feature is the ability to add under settings a list of sites I&#x27;d prefer not to see any results from.<p>For example experts-exchange where they want you to sign up to see the answer. There&#x27;s also a bunch of scraping websites that don&#x27;t have actual answers which just pollute the results. Being able to suppress that kind of site would be wonderful.<p>I&#x27;m aware you can use an option on the search itself, problem is that the list of sites I like to remove from the search is too long to type each time.

DDG results have improved tremendously, top stack overflow &#x2F; github matches are shown partially which is really neat<p>I FULLY switched to DDG (&amp; also away from Chrome) when I found out when I click save password on login forms my password is sent to Google Servers (I must have missed it on the TOC)

DuckDuckGo really looses the battle when it comes to search results.<p>And since they make the case with privacy, I also want to make clear, they don&#x27;t loose because Google tracks us all, even if you are logged out from your account, use vpn servers, delete all of your cookies and cache, Google is just so much better and DuckDuckGo awful and some search results are just weird.<p>I tried once (it must have been this year) to use DuckDuckGo as my main search engine, basically whenever I did not find something quickly enough I just switched to Google and then found my object of desire often times instantly. One of my VPN-Servers is blocked by Google and because of that I am using Bing at the moment, which also seems so much better than DuckDuckGo was when I used it.<p>I installed LinuxMint on a non-techy person&#x27;s machine a while ago (few weeks) and DuckDuckGo was set up as default search engine with Firefox, even that person used Google, because he&#x2F;she wasn&#x27;t happy with the search results. Used Google even though he&#x2F;she had to manually go to google.com every single time<p>&quot;We don&#x27;t bubble you&quot; is a unique selling point they have profited greatly from, and that&#x27;s what made them well known to begin with, nothing else really.

Good to see them progressing.<p>I made the switch a year ago having found their results had improved greatly to the point of &quot;good enough&quot;. Before that I agree there was a problem.<p>For maybe 2-3% of the time I&#x27;ll need to revert to google et al, but I see that as a fair price&#x2F;compromise for even a small taste of privacy ... which is like tasting the purest of waters.<p>DDG is my default.

My experience has been reminiscent of the old SE days, when different engines would often fare better&#x2F;worse for varying queries, vs there being an all-out winner. I think of DDG as avoiding a fair amount of overtly &quot;consumer&quot; content. Google is great at getting to &quot;interaction points,&quot; DDG is great for information. I quite like the DDG ability to play embedded videos from the search results page, and their accompanying privacy warning.

Has anyone considered that the slightly longer and forgettable name DuckDuckGo might have something to do with the low mainstream presence? I think they should rebrand and market with duckgo or maybe just duck.com if at all practically possible.

I&#x27;ve been using DDG for many years now, and I think the search results are excellent in most cases. Sometimes I&#x27;m not satisfied, and try the same seach on Google. Most of the time though, I get the same results there.<p>My only gripe is that the last half year or so, w3schools has been getting at the top of the search results. (Previously w3schools did not show in the search results.)

It&#x27;s not surprising, but if they really want to become mainstream, they&#x27;ll have to get people caring more about privacy than they already do. I mean okay, the Snowden leaks and stuff about PRISM got a lot of people using it, but those people were still most tech savvy types who value their privacy over the quality of the search results.<p>DDG is getting better, but it&#x27;ll have to beat Google and the likes on a quality level if it&#x27;s going to get the interest of people who don&#x27;t seem to give a damn about their privacy.

Using duckduckgo i found out that google blocks booksee.org domain. I spend some time trying to find ebook using google, implying its the best search engine in the world.

I feel like the search results are getting better.<p>EDIT: Complaint #1 removed. I can change the THEME in DDG to get blue links. Awesome.<p>#2 Complaint is that I dislike the font-weight changes on search sites. I don&#x27;t need my search words bolded. I know what I searched for, I trust that those words are in the search results, you don&#x27;t need to show them to me.<p>It&#x27;s actually the SUPPORTING words around my keywords that are going to make me click them after I&#x27;ve already searched. So if anything should be bold, it should be those words because they set each listing apart from the others.<p>The Positive (for me):<p>As I do SEO for some companies sometimes, I often times use DDG as a baseline because it doesn&#x27;t track me. If I see one of my companies ranked high in DDG AND Google, I believe what I&#x27;m seeing in Google in terms of SEO A little more. I know it&#x27;s not really accurate, and I tell my clients this, but it&#x27;s nice to say that DDG is not tracked so it&#x27;s not influenced by my previous searches, and seeing a site ranked high there too is a really good thing in my opinion.

Wikipedia has lots of disambiguation pages but somehow this idea has never made it into the search world. Perhaps the idea of a single text box that you can type &quot;Michelangelo&quot; into is not a good one. Tracking the user so you can get some context (is it Ninja Turtles or art history usually with this person?) seems a logical extension of the lunacy of that situation.<p>I use DDG a fair bit but I feel like without revisiting that assumption that a single context-free text box is even desirable, ditching the tracking (which I am totally in favour of) feels like they are dooming themselves.<p>I&#x27;ve played a little with running Yacy locally and directing it to crawl only sites I care about. So far that habit has not stuck.<p>The bangs are a step in the right direction. Suggesting additional search terms isn&#x27;t quite right, and neither is doing a site specific search since I don&#x27;t know what site will have the information.<p>Maybe a &quot;metabang&quot; where you search all the bangs in a category? &quot;python !!tech&quot;<p>Anyway, its good to see DDG growing.

I seem to have finally switched permanently a couple of days ago[1]. Pleasantly surprised.<p>[1] The clincher? Copying a link on Google and finding for the umpteenth time that it was a #$%# redirect. (This is on my phone so greasemonkey plugins don&#x27;t help.) There comes a time when you say enough.

I recently started using DDG as my default search engine. I&#x27;m usually fine with searches, however what troubles me most times is the extracted content on result page. For example, when I search &quot;How to make coffee&quot;[1] the result links are good for both, however the extracted text shown in Google results are generally more relevant to my query. In this example, Google shows me instructions to make coffee in each result, while DDG shows the first text it could find which is totally irrelevant to what I want.<p>So in short, I feel a lag when deciding when and what to click with DDG.<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;7jCEH" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;7jCEH</a>

I started using DDG this year. I&#x27;ve found the main thing that drives me back to Google (and frequently) is searching for anything where freshness of results matters; that&#x27;s where I&#x27;m seeing the biggest difference in quality of results.

FYI: DuckDuckGo primarily leverages the Yahoo BOSS api in the US.

It&#x27;s a great search engine, and gettig better with time ..

I don&#x27;t actually use DDG for privacy primarily. I use if for the instant answer and !bang goodness. If you&#x27;re a developer, both of these are indispensable. If if the results don&#x27;t work, you can always !g.

It&#x27;s really good to see that even in a such powerful monopoly that it is, the &quot;search&quot; who Google has, it still have space for competition. DDG focus on a niche on this, and they are growing.

I made the switch. My biggest problem with the lack of privacy is that I don&#x27;t know in X years how my data will be used. In X years - laws may change - mores may change - the fortune of google may change. It just doesn&#x27;t seem prudent for me and my progeny.<p>For example searching for information about cigarettes or cigar clubs - 30 years ago may have been socially acceptable. Today if that information were available from the 80&#x27;s it could provide signal for insurance companies determining rates.

Maybe slightly off topic but wouldn&#x27;t it be nice to have something like WSQL (Web Search Query Language) such as:<p><pre><code> &quot;Select text from *.co.uk where page contains = XXXX and page.popularity &gt; YY&quot;. </code></pre> We then could have different implementations as we do with SQL (mariadb, postgres...) name them Google, Duckduckgo, Bing...<p>I did a quick search on my default search engine (DDG) and couldn&#x27;t find anything related...

Wow, so many people talking about how DDG is lacking good search results.<p>Here&#x27;s my personal experience. I&#x27;ve tried using DDG 2 years ago, and it sucked. In my language (italian) results were poor, and also for general searches.<p>6 Months ago I gave it a try again, and I&#x27;ve been pleased enough to use it both at work, at home and on my smartphone.<p>The results are not always perfect, but I find myself using !g bang mainly when I feel there&#x27;s something missing (which doesn&#x27;t happen that much) or when I need to find a very selective piece of information.<p>I also loved the integration with stack overflow. Works nicely, it doesn&#x27;t always &quot;answer&quot; your question, but just yesterday it did and the moment was like &quot;wow, it&#x27;s getting interesting&quot;.<p>So, while I admit that DDG may not be ready for prime time yet, I guess there&#x27;s a chance that many of us (developers, etc) might start liking it and using it constantly.<p>While it would be naive to say &quot;I wouldn&#x27;t go back to google&quot;, I&#x27;m now an happy user of DDG, and I wasn&#x27;t expecting it to begin with (In fact I was very skeptical).

I really like how their instant answers are open source, and they&#x27;re really nice. (e.g. npm, GitHub, regex&#x2F;vim cheatsheet)<p>I do have 2 complaints, and together, they made me switch back to Google.<p>1) Results aren&#x27;t as relevant, especially when I&#x27;m searching for very new or specific things.<p>2) Speed. I&#x27;m not sure why, but DDG seems to stumble on some searches, which end up taking 2-3x the time they&#x27;re supposed to.

In all honesty, despite me knowing about DDG for reaaaaalllly long time, I still tend to forget their name. &quot;something duck&quot; is how non-tech people reference it. Cant you really name it something easy to remember and (ouch) Google like Duckgo? Or Ducker? Or anything else that can be pronounced by anyone within one breath?

I switched to DDG maybe about a year ago, not because of privacy concerns exactly, but because I was getting concerned that Google&#x27;s results were getting less and less accurate (literal) for what I was searching for.<p>I think this is something that technical people tend to care about more than non-technical. I find now that I&#x27;m using DDG for very specific searches and Google for &quot;fuzzier&quot; things (via !g).<p>Google also tends to order results better than DDG, where DDG might have the result I&#x27;m looking for in its result set, the relevance ranking of the results isn&#x27;t <i>quite</i> as good as Google.<p>About the only other things I search Google for are images (!gi) and if I need to constrain the date range down on the results (afaik DDG doesn&#x27;t have any way to say &quot;between these two dates&quot; or &quot;in the last month&quot;).

If I remember correctly, DDG doesn&#x27;t crawl the web on their own, so considering the many comments here saying they stopped using DDG because of bad result, is there any way for them to improve on this?<p>Are all improvements made to the actual search results caused by improved from Yahoo or Bing ?

I use DDG almost exclusively on my phone, and Google almost exclusively on my laptop.

Interactive DDG Search Traffic Stats: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;apps.axibase.com&#x2F;chartlab&#x2F;e8635882&#x2F;10&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;apps.axibase.com&#x2F;chartlab&#x2F;e8635882&#x2F;10&#x2F;</a>

I love DDG but I think as the world turns away from document indexing and more toward intent based search, plus the ever increasing use of implicit data (gps location, speed of movement etc) - I can&#x27;t see how DDG are going to grow.<p>Ultimately search will end up with something a bit like Siri (but something that works). The hound demo (if real) is a very impressive glimpse of the future of search.<p>For those who haven&#x27;t seen it : <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=M1ONXea0mXg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=M1ONXea0mXg</a>

I generally like it but I definitely don&#x27;t like some of its apparent integrations.<p>For instance, I search for recipes a lot. And Yummly &quot;wrappers&quot; seem to come up <i>a lot</i> on DuckDuckGo, often barely acknowledged as being Yummly. I don&#x27;t know what Yummly is but it just seems <i>scummy</i>...it seems to wrap pages that I know are <i>clearly</i> recipes on other web sites, yet they&#x27;re made to appear like Yummly pages. Why? There&#x27;s no reason for this kind of middle-man stuff.

On desktop I only use DDG, mostly because I think their visual design &amp; typography is much more pleasing than Google&#x27;s, and the search results are usually just as good.

I love ddg for english searches.<p>For non english searches it is still behind google. For example &quot;pizza name-of-my-town&quot; lacks half the pizza places google lists.

I&#x27;ve been using DDG almost exclusively for the past two years. It&#x27;s improved a lot in that time and now I hardly ever have to !g.

Tried a few queries with it. Seems like its accuracy has improved greatly over last year, but still throws me a Japanese article for no reason.<p>Search is really a very hard business, in terms of both technology and market. I don&#x27;t think they have Google level quality right now, so I won&#x27;t consider use it seriously.

RE: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;duck.co&#x2F;help&#x2F;company&#x2F;advertising-and-affiliates" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;duck.co&#x2F;help&#x2F;company&#x2F;advertising-and-affiliates</a> I think it would be cool if it was possible to do ads direct with DDG.

DDG is basically a meta-search engine. It is then better to host it yourself with <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;asciimoo&#x2F;searx" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;asciimoo&#x2F;searx</a><p>Set it up remotely and you basicially have your own DDG.

The privacy of DuckDuckGo is worthless when I click on the first link and it includes ajax and fonts from the google domain (and facebook and twitter buttons and whatnot) - might as well just type my search term in google.

Going to chime in on the whole &#x27;results are getting better&#x27;.<p>They might be. On paper; because there is more data.<p>Unfortunately, nobody is accounting for the &#x27;stale&#x27; factor.<p>Searching old news is well.. old news.

And rightfully so.

In all honesty, I don&#x27;t care if they (google) track me. I just want to find the right information as fast as possible.

Much deserved progress.