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Businesses Privacy The Internet

DuckDuckGo Is Growing Fast (bleepingcomputer.com) 65

Posted by BeauHD from the deserved-recognition dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from BleepingComputer: DuckDuckGo, the privacy-focused search engine, announced that August 2020 ended in over 2 billion total searches via its search platform. While Google remains the most popular search engine, DuckDuckGo has gained a great deal of traction in recent months as more and more users have begun to value their privacy on the internet. DuckDuckGo saw over 2 billion searches and 4 million app/extension installations, and the company also said that they have over 65 million active users. DuckDuckGo could shatter its old traffic record if the same growth trend continues. Even though DuckDuckGo is growing rapidly, it still controls less than 2 percent of all search volume in the United States. However, DuckDuckGo's growth trend has continued throughout the year, mainly due to Google and other companies' privacy scandal.
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DuckDuckGo Is Growing Fast More

DuckDuckGo Is Growing Fast

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  • How is it any different? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by rsilverlight ( 7230204 ) on Thursday September 17, 2020 @07:08PM (#60517382)
    It is Bing under the hood for the "text" search, and it gives worse results than Bing. It is Google under the hood (if I understand correctly) for image search, so Bing = Google = DDG because they all go through Google SafeSearch. Again, correct me if I am wrong, but if you are looking for un-PC meme'ry, none of the three returns what you were looking for anymore. It's not that it's just filtering out terrorism/CP/whatever, but even with SafeSearch off, if you are getting nearly identical results on all three search engines and aren't getting something that was an un-PC meme three years ago, there is something bad at hand. I had a handful of items which returned perfectly one week and two weeks later, I was not able to find any evidence that the four items had ever existed before on the Internet.

    This is what happens when you leave the fate of the Internet to Google and Microsoft.
    • Who downmodded this? Spot on with my experiences.

    • Re:How is it any different? (Score:5, Informative)

      by jon3k ( 691256 ) on Thursday September 17, 2020 @09:39PM (#60517692)
      Just proxying my requests and hiding my IP address from Google or Bing is enough for me to use it. I've found the results to be good 98% of the time, which is enough to set it as my default. If you occasionally need to search Google you can use the ddg "bang" which will allow you to keep the same default search provider in your browser, but automatically be redirected to Google results (eg: !google ). Obviously this will expose you directly to Google, but I find I rarely need it.

      Also, it doesn't exclusively use Bing results. DuckDuckGo has DuckDuckBot [duckduckgo.com] which is their own web crawler, along with lots of other sources [duckduckgo.com].

    • My experiences with it are good enough to use it first.

      The *instant* I google anything- every platform gets targeted ads based on what I just searched about.
      It's *CREEPY*.

      Doesn't happen with Duckduckgo.

      The 2-3% of the time I can't find it with duckduckgo, I'll fall back to google usually.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Reziac ( 43301 ) *

      The search results are evidently filtered differently, because I do get more relevant results with DDG. Tho in recent years the difference is less obvious.

      DDG's interface is less annoying and the results are less cluttered with ads and sponsored links.
      Tho in the past year or so, DDG stopped working properly unless JS is enabled.

      So not a huge improvement, but overall still less obnoxious than the competition.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by ebvwfbw ( 864834 )

      Google filters for their political leanings. Search for Biden's video where he boasts about making the Ukrainian government fire the prosecutor that was going after his Son's clearly illegal activities while he was VP. It's on youtube so use the site qualifier. Google won't cough it up. DDG does. Just watch the video, it shows clear corruption on Biden's part to the point he'll even talk about it openly on TV. He cannot be trusted.

      Lots of over examples. If it's critical of the left google tries to protect

  • Even if it is private now (Score:3)

    by Revek ( 133289 ) on Thursday September 17, 2020 @07:17PM (#60517412)
    There is no way some standard issue sociopathic asshat won't eventually end up in control and sell everyone out.

    • Re:Even if it is private now (Score:5, Informative)

      by sorenstoutner ( 1303759 ) on Thursday September 17, 2020 @07:27PM (#60517436)

      Don't worry. It isn't private now.

      https://www.stoutner.com/new-d... [stoutner.com]

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        Same old story, start out with good intentions but as things scale up they can't afford to keep to their principals.

      • Whoever modded this up as informative ought to read https://duckduckgo.com/privacy [duckduckgo.com] and think again. They have to track which ads on DuckDuckGo are click on to know who owes them money for the clicks. That isn't a tracker in the privacy sense as it doesn't associate the clicks with a profile, computer or person, nor does DDG embed their own ads on other people's sites, unlike Google. Also, you can actually disable advertisements without paying a penny.

        • Privacy policies aren't worth the 1s and 0s they are written with.

          I have seen DuckDuckGo use redirects to track links that aren't ads, although they don't do it all the time. It seems to be some sort of A/B testing.

          In addition, the link in the comment you are replied to clearly shows a site-wide tracker that is blocked by EasyPrivacy. ;)

          • The only blocked "tracker" on that page is for https://improving.duckduckgo.c... [duckduckgo.com] which is indeed for anonymous A/B testing. I put "tracker" in quotes here because if that's a tracker then so are basic Apache/IIS server logs which collect far more info. Folks can go to https://help.duckduckgo.com/pr... [duckduckgo.com] and read about what they do with the anonymous info they collect or they can navigate straight to the domain and it explains in simpler terms what it is there for.

            Besides, this is no more a tracker than th

  • How do we know? (Score:3)

    by sphealey ( 2855 ) on Thursday September 17, 2020 @08:14PM (#60517526)

    How do we know DuckDuckGo keeps search data private? They say they do. Have they ever been audited by a trustworthy 3rd party?

    • "A trusted 3rd party"? Ain't no such thing any more.

    • Re:How do we know? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by locofungus ( 179280 ) on Friday September 18, 2020 @01:12AM (#60517918)

      How do we know DuckDuckGo keeps search data private? They say they do. Have they ever been audited by a trustworthy 3rd party?

      DuckDuckGo don't have their tentacles into every other webpage on the internet.

      It's getting to the point where it's impossible to avoid google trackers. I try not to use google, I have no accounts with them, I do not search with them, and javascript from google domains is blocked by default.

      I recently had to confirm my electoral roll registration (This is a mandatory UK thing that happens every year where you have to confirm that the voters that are registered at a particular address is correct). I was forced to go though the "I am not a robot" google stuff to do that - which forced me to enable javascript for some google domains.

      In theory this can be done on paper or by telephone, but this time I didn't get a paper form to complete at all, just an email with a link to a website (which itself redirects via a link tracking site!)

      • Re: (Score:2, Troll)

        by drinkypoo ( 153816 )

        It's getting to the point where it's impossible to avoid google trackers. I try not to use google, I have no accounts with them, I do not search with them, and javascript from google domains is blocked by default.

        So what you're saying is that you're successfully avoiding them?

        I recently had to confirm my electoral roll registration (This is a mandatory UK thing that happens every year where you have to confirm that the voters that are registered at a particular address is correct). I was forced to go though the "I am not a robot" google stuff to do that - which forced me to enable javascript for some google domains.

        Temporarily, for one google domain.

        That IS irritating, reCAPTCHA is total shit, but it's not as big a deal as you make it out to be. You also could have done it from a VM, another browser, etc.

  • I switched to DuckDuckGo when google started their harassment campaign against the Australian government and was spanning me with yellow "warning" symbols and other crap on the search page.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by znrt ( 2424692 )

      harassment? don't feel that special. that's just your overlords getting greedy and google showing them the finger.

      google has everyone by the balls equally (except china) because everything already depends too much on them. some people just don't know yet. but whatever the fancy words right now nobody can actually pull of what google does (except china).

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Cederic ( 9623 )

      I switched to it when Google search on mobile devices returned only amp links.

      Fuck that shit. I'm accessing a site, I want to access the site, not go through someone explicitly able to MitM me.

  • I've been using DDG for a few years now. It's just as good as Google. Sadly it also suffers from the same problems: the first pages of results are often filled with sites that are all very similar generic clones of each other like TechRadar and HowToGeek.

    • I could be imagining it, but I remember in the late 90s, I remember search engines pretty regularly requiring you to click through 5 or 8 pages of results (if they returned that many) to get to what you needed.

      Then in the mid-2000s there was a kind of peak - Google became the search engine that actually gave you needed, consistently, on page 1. Usually the top half of page 1.

      Then over the past decade we've seen the results slide back in usefulness. They've got a lot more content indexed, but a higher propor

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by teg ( 97890 )

        I could be imagining it, but I remember in the late 90s, I remember search engines pretty regularly requiring you to click through 5 or 8 pages of results (if they returned that many) to get to what you needed.

        Then in the mid-2000s there was a kind of peak - Google became the search engine that actually gave you needed, consistently, on page 1. Usually the top half of page 1.

        Then over the past decade we've seen the results slide back in usefulness. They've got a lot more content indexed, but a higher proportion of it is crap, and is burying the useful stuff.

        The reason for this is Search Engine Optimization [wikipedia.org]. Because being found is valuable, people and companies started to work on finding ways to boost their ranking in the search score. While some of this is just organizing and marking pages properly, for many companies this is just the start - so they use other tricks as well. This is the opposite of what the search engines want - they want a combination of paid results and the best results. Thus, there is a continous game of cat and mouse here...

      • It’s a natural result of Google’s improvement. Once Google managed to get the most relevant results on page 1, people mostly stopped looking at subsequent pages. As a result, being on page 1 became incredibly valuable to certain companies. So companies try to game the system to go up in the page ranking, and at the same time Google themselves have been tempted to sell page 1 space, and disguise it as actual search results.

      • Google flat out ignores words I type unless they get wrapped in quotes. Even after that its sometimes still ignored to bring me something semi-related. No I don't want something kind of close I want results with exact combination of words I typed.

    • Well that's better than my experience with Google. With Google literally one recent search result have nine ads before any actual results.

      And as I said in my other discussion in this post. Will Google the second I search for anything I start getting targeted ads on every other webpage time creeps me out.
      It's obvious Google is spying on me.

      When I search with DuckDuckGo I don't start getting advertisements on every other page so I know that if they're violated my privacy they're doing it more discreetly at l

  • (TrueScore: 3, Finally Relevant)

    I don't see TrueScore dude here yet, but...

    I've been using DuckDuckGo via Firefox almost exclusively for search purposes for several months now. Not because I identify as a waterfowl with a vulpine preference - but because of privacy concerns. Not that I trusted either of them completely to start with, based on what I've read. But, it didn't take long before the weirdly specific "follow-you-around-the-internet" type ads/recommendations we all know and love started showing up

    • Try something like Ghostery (yes, another to not trust) to block a ton of tracking garbage.

      • If you arent blocking all of it, your attempt to block the tracking is another data point that they will profile you with.
    • I use qwant,it is good
    • It's definitely getting harder to protect our privacy. I'm currently using Firefox Multi-Account Containers along with blockers for JS, cookies, and fingerprinting, but I'm sure there are still ways to identifying me and collect my data, especially given the drastic increase in complexity of browser fingerprinting. It's a pain having to whitelist JS and cookies for sites that require it but it's the price for maintaining some level of privacy.

  • Looking for a good search engine... (Score:3)

    by arcade ( 16638 ) on Thursday September 17, 2020 @11:44PM (#60517854) Homepage

    I remember when I started using Google, back in '98. It was amazingly much better than the rest. It kept being amazing until around 2009, where a change was introduced that no longer required all the words you searched for. Then synonyms were added. Then attempts to figure out what you searched for. It got rather useless.

    Then someone added Verbatim search to Google. It was good again for many years, until I guess some time last year. Since then, results have gotten sucky with Verbatim search too.

    I tend to go more and more to duckduckgo, bing and other search engines, as Google quite simply keeps returning irrelevant results.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Misagon ( 1135 )

      Unfortunately, DuckDuckGo doesn't require all search words either.

      It does not respect the "+" convention any more (or ever) for indicating mandatory words, while Google still does.

      • It's too bad. I switched to DuckDuckGo when Google broke their search engine that way, and now DuckDuckGo has the same problem. I still use DuckDuckGo because the results are better, but I really need to find if there's a search engine out there that doesn't second guess me on every search.

    • Putting specific things in quotes forces the word(s) or phrase(s) to exist in the results. Google usually does okay for me when I do that. Where Google is pretty terrible at search is international searching. If the best resource does not match the user's language or geographic area, it'll wind up lower on the results like page 5 or 6.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by forty-2 ( 145915 )

      I miss Altavista's 'near' operator, letting you search for word pairings within a few words of each other, as opposed to getting hits for giant list pages that have the words you're looking for, but are in no way related.

  • DDG is nice, but its search results aren't good as Google's. :(

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by rl117 ( 110595 )

      This depends entirely upon what you are searching for.

      If you want specific answers to specific queries, DDG is much better.

      If you want some generic answer to a query that Google reinterprets to "what we thought you meant", then by that metric Google is better.

      Personally, I prefer the answers to the questions I ask, rather than what some dumb AI thought I should have asked, but didn't. I've been using DDG for several years now, and I find it perfectly acceptable and of better quality than Google for my need

    • Yandex is also very good.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by otuz ( 85014 )

      At least in my case, DDG returns relevant results whereas Google presents a bunch of scam sites.

  • Better than Google (Score:3)

    by otuz ( 85014 ) on Friday September 18, 2020 @07:51AM (#60518300) Homepage

    I switched a few years ago and sometimes fell back to Google when I couldn't find anything relevant. Now I usually find the relevant stuff on DDG, and if I try Google for the same results, I only get all kinds of scam sites. Another good thing about DDG is that it doesn't do the confirmation bubble enforcement thing Google does by spying on you.

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