DuckDuckGo Just Finished a Banner Year

DuckDuckGo, a privacy-oriented search engine, netted more than 35 billion search queries in 2021, a 46.4% jump over 2020 (23.6 billion). From a report: That's big. Even so, the company, which bills itself as the "Internet privacy company," offering a search engine and other products designed to "empower you to seamlessly take control of your personal information online without any tradeoffs," remains a rounding error compared to Google in search. Whether it remains a highly successful (and profitable) rounding error, however, could depend on how serious we become about the privacy of our searches.

Switched over

[pele]

Switched over to duck a long time ago, not because of privacy but because of all the cookies and advertisements and because I got tired of feeding pool ole google.

Re:Switched over

[Echoez]

Same here. Is DDG better? I'm not sure, but it's certainly "good enough" that the slightly worse results are a welcome trade-off to being followed everywhere across the internet. Combined with Brave browser, it's amazing at how less spied-upon you feel. I remember buying a shirt from Banana Republic, and for MONTHS afterwards, I'd see BR ads on every site (for shirts! I just bought a shirt! I don't need another one).

I even have a DDG widget on my Android home screen, and it also works just as well. DDG also has a good image search, it handles movie showtimes, etc. I just don't see a need to go back to Google.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

Youre just flat out lying, I just tried a google search for funny biden memes and there was zero mentions of Trump.

Re:Switched over

[crunchygranola]

Yes the AC is lying.

Now it is true that Google is getting crappier and crappier, but not because it is pushing a political agenda - it is because it is pushing monetization for its bottom line (which can never be fat enough), and a push to lowest common denominator search and an associated notion that it is better to return lots of irrelevant results, than show the user there are only limited matches.

Search result diluting practices include boosting links with commercial value for Google, sure, but to me even more annoying is returning links that do not contain the terms I entered, even quoting every term to tell Google "yes I really want to search on this" is not completely effective. It returns irrelevant links in two ways that I have observed - deleting terms from your search (though often, but not always they tell you in tiny little letters that this link was for a different search with a term or two deleted); and stuffing terms they think are similar into you search instead of what you actually searched on. On some searches this last effect can be really bad.

Re:Switched over

[garett_spencley]

I was just reading a comment thread on Hacker News [ycombinator.com] last night about people complaining about Google search results returning nothing but SEO spam sites these days.

I switched to DDG a while ago too but mostly because I started to find that it actually gives me better search results these days.

The only exception is if I want local results for, like, restaurants or something. Then I'll open Google in a private window and deal with the fact that they'll use GeoIP to know my location (I hardly ever use a cell phone for anything - not only because of privacy but because I'm old and never jumped on the bandwagon, now get off my lawn).

DDG gives me the sense that it's doing keyword matching rather than trying to guess what I meant to search for based on current trends and my past search history etc. I think Google took personalization and ML way too far and started to become useless, at least for tech-savvy people.

What was discussed in the Hacker News thread yesterday was exploring how Google's usefulness originally came from using hyperlinks as a form "vote." But this meant that votes became a sort of currency and so websites started linking to each other less, especially as content began to move off of the open web and into walled gardens. All that's left is SEO spam sites that give you useless nonsense like "The Best Grills in 2022!" which is just a bunch of fake content wrapping affiliate links.

DDG does return those spam sites but I seem to get a lot more actual content in the results ... in addition to better privacy and a search term parser that doesn't try to guess what I meant to search for.

Re:

[organgtool]

I switched to DDG a while ago too but mostly because I started to find that it actually gives me better search results these days.

I switched TO DDG a while ago as well but lately I've had to fall back to Google far more often because the results on DDG are sometimes just terrible. Don't get me wrong, Google has gotten a lot worse as well over the past several years, but at least I can eventually find what I want with Google while that seems to be getting a lot harder to do with DDG.

Re:

[matmos]

I suggest using startpage or one of the googlified searx proxies.

Re:

[x_t0ken_407]

Yeah I've been using DDG for a year our two now exclusively, with Startpage my fallback when I need Google results. It's worked out well.

Re: Switched over

[mr.morbo]

Startpage has been giving me garbage results lately. Type the same search into Google and the first page is full of valid results.

It's almost like Google are deliberately thwarting them to drive the search directly to Google.

Re:

[tohoward]

I'll second this: DDG is generally good enough and i use it as my primary, but I find several times a month I need to run the same search on google to get what I'm after.

Generally, I think I've noticed it improving over the course of the year 2021, and and if you are trying to move away from the big tech companies that are blatant about viewing you as their product, I'd say it's a fine solution.

Re:Switched over

[ArchieBunker]

I'll add some more complaints. The youtube results that keep showing up in google searches. If I wanted youtube I would go there and search. The local retailer links are worthless too. They don't even respect wrapping terms in quotes. I can come up with two word searches where the second word is completely ignored even with quotes.

Re:

[matmos]

Google does give better results than DDG (via way of startpage.com) sometimes tho. DDG is my go to, and then I'll try startpage (proxied google) if I'm not happy with results

Re:

[BeaverCleaver]

Got a link to that thread?

Re:

[gweihir]

Switched over about a year ago because Google was really getting on my nerves. Now I use Google maybe 2-3 times a month and often find that no, it does not find anything relevant either.

Re:

[Bradac_55]

We all know the real reason you still go back to google, porn.

DDG doesn't do porn or math equations.

Re:

[gweihir]

You seems to be mentally defective, because you state things that you obviously know absolutely nothing about and have not tried to find out. Pathetic.

Re:

[VeryFluffyBunny]

My favourite aspect of DDG is that it doesn't profile users. You just get the results to your queries, no matter what your search history might be. That way, you can learn how to write better search queries without some profiling algorithm complicating things for you.

Hopefully they will not follow the lead

[luvirini]

of Google and make their search ignore what you are searching for.

I switched to them a few years back mostly because Google started to ignore what I was searching for.

The biggest problem with Google is when searching for something where there is a more popular meaning, you cannot exclude those results with a minus like you used to be able to there too.

Re:

[gweihir]

Indeed. Google is just annoying in most cases these days.

Tech and politics

[itiswhatitiwijgalt]

I'll never understand why these companies don't see that people will leave if someone tries to control what they can say and think. They are essentially tech Karens at this point. Twitter, facebook, youtube, reddit, google... and others are all following the same playbook. Just this week, Joe Rogan got sick of it and moved to gittr with 9m of his user base. Gab has been growing for a while now due to people waking up and getting tired of it. Youtube users are bleeding over to rumble at a growing rate.

Re:

[ArchieBunker]

Cool, now I know where to find all the latest breakthroughs in ivermectin news!

Re:

[Waffle Iron]

This is a good development.

Back in my day, it was easier to tell when information was coming from crackpots because it was usually disseminated on fuzzy mimeographed pamphlets or low-grade cassette tapes. However, since the big tech companies came around, every ignorant moron can shove their content out in a way that it looks indistinguishable from reputable sources. This has resulted in the recent massive outbreaks of idiocy in our society.

Now, if the crackpots all move to their own tech platform ghettos,

Re:

[gweihir]

Fact-checking has become an important skill. Too bad most people cannot do it and are unable to learn. It has become a real problem. "Deniers" everywhere and usually people that do not even understand the basics of Science and why it works.

Re:

[gweihir]

That is the normal evolution of any "innovative" business. These people claim they are different, but they are not. What happens is that if you grow fast, you are allowed to experiment. Then the risk-averse bean-counters with no actual understanding of the business take over and things crumble slowly. Some remain as basically a generic service and others vanish.

Acquaintance of mine left google a while ago because he saw exactly this happening.

AMP Pushed Me Over the Cliff

[eepok]

I switched from Google to DuckDuckGo because of AMP. I just go sick and tired of getting the AMP version of webpages/articles by default when clicking links in Google web searches. AMP kills functionality and makes web ads even worse.

The DuckDuckGo Search Widget...

[VicVegas]

on my phone also doubles as a browser. I left Google & Bing about 5 years ago in favor of DDG.

As for the hand-wringing about DuckDuckGo suddenly reversing course and harvesting data? If they give up their profitable-enough niche and try to emulate Google, the company will be left twitching on the floor, as it hemorrhages users at a staggering rate. DDG's last act, in such a scenario, would be to roll out the red carpet for the next privacy-based search engine to come along.

I've switched (mostly)

[Java Pimp]

It's great for the most part. However, I still have to fall back to google for some of the more obscure development related searches.

Re:I've switched (mostly)

[Miles_O'Toole]

Finish the job of cutting the cord; use Startpage as your other search engine. Basically, it's Google without all the nasty tracking crap. I've been very happy with it, along with DuckDuckGo.

Re:

[Straumli Perversion]

If DDG doesn't bring it back, slap a !sp on the end of the query to run it through proxied google. Best of both worlds.

Re:

[Java Pimp]

I'll need to try this, thanks!

Re:They're going to make money how?

[Waffle Iron]

So how exactly is it they plan on making money then?

The same way publishers and (more recently) broadcasters made money for centuries: Ads that are targeted based on just what you're looking at in this moment, rather than being based on the intimate details of your entire life history.

When they become popular enough...

[fustakrakich]

They will be Googlefied... subject to all the same harassment about "illegal" content, secret orders to track users, etc..

Maybe some day Yacy [yacy.net] can catch on as something more robust

Left DDG this year

[space_spaghetti]

I used DDG as my default search engine when I switched to the Brave browser about a year ago. There was something I was looking up, game assets, or public domain art or something, I can't remember... but DDG had no clue what I was talking about. I became thoroughly unimpressed with the DDG search results and their map system [provided by Apple?] so I went back to Google a couple months ago.

another search engine gone

[white5moke]

here we go! now some overly entitled financially bloated mopes will buy its stock and make it another marketing presentation tool instead of a useful SEARCH ENGINE. just counting the days. it's not that great of a search engine anyhow, as it piggy-backs on top of search algos established and owned by guess who? Google! let's face it, folks the internet is dead. we're chasing profit-machines dressed as quality information, when the internet used to be the shining example of what a technological information r

A Banner Year For Dupes?

[westlake]

Slashdot published a near identical post about DucjDuckGo on Dec 26th. StatCounter's global stats for search show Google with 95% of the market, Bing 3% and DDG 7/10 of 1%. Which simply isn't all that impressive.

Re:

[Stormthirst]

I'm with you on that one. Google is still 1000 times better than DDG. I've tried it multiple times, but keep switching back to Google.