DuckDuckGo Traffic

[VWWHFSfQ]

Been using DDG in Firefox for the past ~5 years or so. About 50% of my searches give me exactly what I'm looking for within the first few results. 20% require a little more digging, maybe adjusting my search terms. 30% are nearly total garbage and I just re-run it with !g. I'm not going to switch though because for the most part it's "good enough" and I want to see that hockey stick trend continue.

I'm usually frustrated with the technical searches the most. If I do something simple like search for "django queryset model update" I will get nearly a full page of SEO spam that's literally just copies of the real django docs site before I even get to the actual docs page. This has gotten somewhat better recently, but it's still not nearly as good as Google. Maybe because Google knows what I click on when I search for these things so it just goes right to it. It's a tradeoff, I guess. Although I do often feel like I'm punishing myself with this.

[mrweasel]

The SEO spam has gotten much worse on DDG the past year or so, they pop on Google every now and then as well. Google on the other hand has a page of ads before the real results. My experience is that if DDG can't find what I'm looking for, then neither can Google, it's just that I'm still much quicker to second guess the results on DDG, compared to Google.

It's a little weird, you'd think that it would be easy to spot the sites that just copy text from Stack Overflow or the Python documentation and drop them from the index entirely, but apparently not.

[throwoutway]

I'd like there to be a "Report blogspam / SEO spam / plagiarism" button in DDG.

Step 1: Click the result...

Step 2: Ugh, swipe back

Step 3: Click "Report poor result" > "SEO spam"

Step 4: Click next relevant link

[mirkules]

I started using DDG around 2011. The progress they made is nothing short of incredible. I've completely switched to them around 2015 or so. I've used Google exactly twice last year. I'm curious what kind of queries yield you 30% garbage results?

[acidburnNSA]

> literally just copies of the real django docs site before I even get to the actual docs page

The faster way to get to django docs would be: !dj queryset model update

For python it's !py3

There are thousands of these, and they're awesome.

https://duckduckgo.com/bang?

[otherworldly]

I found the Firefox extension "Search Filter" [1] to be immensely helpful at combating SEO spam. It allows you to define a list of URL patterns to remove from the search result list altogether, you can use mine as a start for your own if you wish [2].

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/g-search-filt...

[2] https://pastebin.com/5MPSHv3w

[feanaro]

I don't understand why DDG doesn't just hand pick the most popular of these documentation sites and pins them to the top when they show up for a query.

[qsort]

Eh, I agree. I default to DuckDuckGo as well, but it's just as a middle finger to Google. It's significantly worse than Google and basically unusable in languages other than English.

Turns out making a search engine is a whole lot of work, I genuinely hope they keep working on it!

[kergonath]

> I'm not going to switch though because for the most part it's "good enough" and I want to see that hockey stick trend continue.

I’m in the same boat. I am also not going to switch because Google is getting consistently worse and filled with rubbish SEO click farms. That’s why I am surprised by

> This has gotten somewhat better recently, but it's still not nearly as good as Google.

Google is really quite bad.

[awb]

> I'm usually frustrated with the technical searches the most.

Same, but I’ll usually give DDG a try first. If the search fails you can prepend “!g “ to your query and it’ll redirect you to Google.

[stavros]

Same for me, though for the garbage results I get garbage from Google too. I will agree that it's unusable for Greek, though.

[peakaboo]

Use !sp instead of !g and you get startpage results which is Google results without the tracking.

[mysterydip]

I wonder if there's a way to have "verified websites", where for example the actual django documentation site is considered authoritative for searches with django in them.

[greenimpala]

Agree with this! It's fantastic for most things but unkind with programmer API docs!

[FredPret]

You just convinced me to try DDG… for the tenth time. Hopefully this time it sticks!

[stjohnswarts]

every time I see !g I say to use !s (startpage) as it's just a proxy :)

[JakeAl]

Or at least a "always omit results from this domain" option.

[JSONderulo]

same, but lately been I've doing technical searches on you.com

[andai]

>!g

If there's an option to get good search results, why isn't it the default?

[susam]

DuckDuckGo has been my primary search tool for close to a decade now. I also like that ddg.gg redirects to duckduckgo.com. The domain ddg.gg is much easier to type on web browsers where I do not have DuckDuckGo configured as a search engine.

I stumbled upon DuckDuckGo fortuitously after installing Vimperator in Firefox around 2009 or so. If I remember correctly, Vimperator had DuckDuckGo as one of the search engine options and that's how I came to know about it.

I use Vimium with Firefox these days and it is really easy to choose either DuckDuckGo or Google for searching using the keyboard sequences od<space> or og<space>, respectively, if these are enabled as custom search engines in the Vimium options page.

[jspash]

I believe it's their name (and domain) that is holding them back. Sure, Google is a silly word but it's now ubiquitous. But "Duck Duck Go" simply doesn't roll off the tongue. It will make adoption much harder.

The shame of it all is that they do own duck.com. Why not rebrand at this point?

So instead of answering questions by saying "why don't you just google it" people could suggest that you someone "duck it".

Hmmm, maybe that has problems of it's own...

[bad_username]

duck.com works as well.

[yosito]

I applied for software engineer job at DDG a couple of years ago. They gave me this page, with the data stopping at 2018, and asked me to create an updated version of the chart showing the projected growth of DDG based on "data" of how I would expect a browser extension to impact their growth. I basically created a PDF of what this page looks like now, but with "projected" data instead of actual, because I didn't have any access to actual data.

Strangest takehome project I ever had for a software engineering position. It was paid though, which is nice.

[howdydoo]

In 2021, DDG handled 35 billion searches. Google first reached that level in 2002 (if this source[1] is accurate).

I have no conclusion, just thought it was an interesting stat to look up.

[1]: https://www.internetlivestats.com/google-search-statistics/

[jeffbee]

Sounds about right. If your search engine traffic is measured on the numerator in the millions, but the denominator is not "per second", then your share of the search market is basically zero.

[mikaeluman]

Been using DuckDuckGo for about 2 years. Amazed at their progress.

Still local searches in Swedish are subpar sometimes.

But I like the fact that they don't seem to be mangling results and manipulating them based on politics.

Google search is pretty useless as it stands now. If I want to find controversial material - for whatever reason, let's say even debunking it - there's a chance google hides it. The recent scandal with Robert Malone and the search term "mass formation psychosis" is really bizarre.

Thank you DDG.

[bitshiftfaced]

> If I want to find controversial material - for whatever reason, let's say even debunking it - there's a chance google hides it.

I find myself searching for information sometimes and then realize "oh, Google might see this as political in some way." That's my primary reason to use DuckDuckGo.

[seoulbran]

I just heard his Rogan podcast, ran the same query, got nothing. I knew something was up... time to start using an alternative.

[trentnix]

I’ve been using DDG for a few years and rarely find myself using Google anymore. I don’t feel like DDG has gotten much better, but Google results definitely seem like they’ve gotten worse. But I could be wrong.

Either way, I’ve come to loathe Google. Now if only a viable YouTube alternative would emerge…

[Kuinox]

It's averaged over 365 days.

Selecting 10/1 day show a different story:

DuckDuckGo progress as stagnated in 2021.

[hu3]

Interesting: https://i.imgur.com/Ahy0GtP.png

Any speculation on the causes of the plateau?

[smarx007]

28 or 90 day average shows essentially the same thing but with less noise. Showing a 365 day average is actually good for the casual observer to remove holiday/seasonal fluctuations and show YoY growth.

[throwaway64643]

That's how you lie with statistics.

[divbzero]

I was looking for a comment like this. To me this is the real news.

This is the first time I’ve seen DuckDuckGo Traffic not look like a steady exponential. With the 365-day rolling average you can see growth leveling off noticeably by the end of 2021. Without the rolling average you can see an unusual spike in Jan 2021 followed by a V for the remainder of the year.

[the-dude]

They have lost me for the moment.

[jsnell]

Oh my, has it been a year again?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25779323

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21311064

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22114540

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18100243

[ty___ler]

Something happened the past few years where DDG image search feels like a functionally better product than google image search. I think it's a combination of a simpler frontend, and maybe a simpler "keyword-based" search algorithm (vs google which feels more ML-leaning). Note: I can't prove this claim at all – just a general feeling I have as someone who uses image search a lot.

[vulcan01]

The graph is averaged over 365 days by default. If you change it to 14 or 28 days you can see that their growth has stagnated since early 2021.

[xojoc]

Due to the HN interest in search engines, you may find useful the "Search Engines" entry on Curlie: https://curlie.org/en/Computers/Internet/Searching/Search_En...

And the "Specialized Search Engines" one: https://curlie.org/en/Computers/Internet/Searching/Search_En...

[EMM_386]

I've been hearing a tremendous number of ads on the radio for DuckDuckGo recently.

It seems they have started a heavy advertising push.

[brimnes]

How does it compare to Brave Search which is supposedly using their own index and not reliant on Bing? [1]

[1]: https://search.brave.com/

[ddp26]

Nit: It can be misleading to show cumulative metrics. You have to mentally take the first derivative. And cumulative metrics never go down! (Guilty of this myself.)

I'd prefer if the chart at the top were daily/monthly queries. Then you'd quickly see their huge growth, but relative stagnation in 2021.

[gnuj3]

I'd love to use DDG daily for all my searches but as soon as I'm trying to search for local places (food, clothing, tool shops, whatever that is really) or specific things I want to buy, I get bad results (I'm in the UK) and I have to switch to Google to get what I need. My wife was complaining as well that she wasnt able to find a lot of good hits when doing research for University. I dont know what it's like in other countries but I hope this will improve over the next few years so I can fully switch.

[carlivar]

Somewhat related: Does anyone know how to report bad links/results in DDG? I had a search the other day for a MacOS issue and the top 3 results was a fake apple software site, super scammy. However I didn't see any buttons or links next to that result to report it specifically.

[seaman1921]

If one ever wanted a taste of how niche the HN crowd is, just look at the comments here. Most of the top comments are people claiming they primarily use DDG, and rarely Google, which is hinting at DDG rapidly catching up in terms of market share and search quality, whereas in reality no one points out that the overall search traffic handled by DDG is basically what Google handled 18-20 years ago :)

Just to put things into perspective, DDG handles 97M queries a day whereas Google receives ~4M queries a minute.

[dantondwa]

Once in a while I try to switch to Duckduckgo. I first use it, then I start to rely more and more on !g, as I know the results will be irrelevant, until I just have the automatism of adding !g for every search. At that point, when I become aware of it, I just switch back to Google, unfortunately.

In the end, Bing is really, really bad and Duckduckgo is just repackaged Bing.

[quambene]

Google's extremely annoying Cookie selection is a UX nightmare: scrolling past two pages before you can press a button. I'd rather go to the library than use Google Search ever again. (An occasional !g bang in DDG is allowed though.)

[jeffbee]

A remarkable job by the Great Satan in Redmond of laundering its substandard search engine through the not-really-arms-length privacy-washing marketing subsidiary, duckduckgo. The searches are provided by Bing and the frontend is hosted in Azure, Microsoft controls both sides of the transaction but people buy the privacy fairy tale, hook line and sinker. Really, a remarkable case study.

Here's a fine example of why DDG's search results are worse than useless, if you needed another one.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=FEMA+concentration+camps&ia=web