For speed, just this week we upgraded our whole caching system, which should significantly speed up a lot of queries. I'd be interested to know if anyone has noticed any difference over the past day or so. This change should equalize a lot of the location differences, which is the main issue. In some parts of the world we were way slower.
I redirect to Google for my site search at Fight Aging! at the moment because it returns far better results than DDG, and with my ~8000 posts and countless topics doing a great job with my own custom search just doesn't make economic sense. If DDG could do as well as Google for the archives I'd switch in an instant; I prefer the idea of sending users somewhere other than Google for queries that may involve medical conditions. But results are the trump card; they have to be good.
I tend to cover any given topic in a brace of interlinked posts across years, and all topics are complex. e.g.:
Thanks for having people answer feedback with real emails. My feedback has been mostly about the existence of malware-wrapped download links for popular tools like FileZilla, PuTTY, vlc, etc. I've gotten good support responses that have removed particular links, but how do I bubble this up into a feature with the goal of never showing a user a non-official download?
I wish to thank you for DDG. I left Google 1 year ago and have never looked back. DDG is better in every way for me. You provide a great service and a big peace of mind for all the hackers of the planet. Now we can compete with the empire without worrying for the empire to copy our ideas. Your courage in competing with this giant is an example we should all copy!
I've certainly noticed a speed difference recently. DDG feels pretty snappy to me now, whereas before it was annoyingly slow, easily taking a second or so to load. I'm located in Luxembourg.
I've certainly noticed a difference in speed. I've been using DDG solid for around a couple years now and the only thing I ever really lament is the speed, so I'm very glad you guys are working on it. And it is definitely getting better. And, as always, I can't live without the disambiguation feature, it saves me so much time.
I've been using DDG at home and at work for at least a year and boy as there been improvements! First of all, I'm swedish and queries in swedish have improved immensly! I can't remember DDG ever being notably slow, so I don't know for the speed-up (I don't care much for speed). But answers in english have improved in quality by magnitude of 10s. When I started using DDG I'd have to check back with google about 1/3 of my queries, but now it's around 1/50, and I can't say the way I do my searches has had any radical changes either.
Way cool. Going to try using this as my default search engine for a while.
I really really like the "alternative to" feature. What could I do to help you get better at alternatives which are not as popular? (eg, "alternative to cheetahmail" or "alternative to grubhub" or "alternative to xkcd"?)
Also, what kind of feedback would you need to help improve the tech-related searches? Like "ebcdic table" or "1010 in hex"?
Can you guys talk Apple into adding it as a preset search-bar option in Safari? It's kind of a pain to add it yourself or get out of the habit of using the search-bar
Wow, thats a great curve. Just wanted to throw in my personal experience with DuckDuckGo, and it doesn't necessarily reflect on DuckDuckGo specifically, however:
After seeing them pop up here once or twice quite recently I thought I'd give it a go, I opened up preferences in Chrome and switched my default search over to DDG. It felt good, made a nice change but was certainly a bit "odd". I found what I wanted, most of the time albeit it with a slight drop in quality vs Google.
But my biggest gripe with them was confidence. I'd just started out at a new job as a programmer and as you can imagine, I was searching for a good few things, usually things I was struggling with and I just didn't feel sure that I was getting the best results I possibly could be. You might think thats totally crazy, but when your battling an issue as many of you know, you want more than anything to work out whats going on. I didn't have any margin for error, I wanted the best results right there that second.
Specifics aside, knowing that Google is far superior in their results makes it real difficult to use another search engine really, extra features (!so etc) or no extra features. I personally search because I need to "find" something and I usually don't know where that something is, opening up Stack Overflow isn't that much of a chore for me. Its the other bit I need help with.
Anyway, I commend their mission and hope they succeed in taking a fair slice of the market. I think he's a great entrepreneur and I wish him the best of luck. I can't imagine what it must be like to be head on with... Google.
DuckDuckGo is definitely pulling users from Google. By mimicking Facebook, Google has lost its mojo. Stepped right into the "social" honeypot. No news. The more interesting thing is the fantastic feeling more and more people have: that Facebook and Google will take eachother down the spiral.
As for the Google part, right now it's probably just an alarmist prediction, but it's going to be fun to watch un/fold. Especially if DuckDuckGo and other engines continue to get better while practicing their principles instead of a crude mixture of addictive search quality, addictedness to bucks and PR along the lines of "Don't be evil".
Google is definitely pulling users from Yahoo. By mimicking Alta Vista, Yahoo has lost its mojo. Stepped right into the "portal" honeypot. No news. The more interesting thing is the fantastic feeling more and more people have: that Alta Vista and Yahoo will take eachother down the spiral.
As for the Yahoo part, right now it's probably just an alarmist prediction, but it's going to be fun to watch un/fold. Especially if Google and other engines continue to get better while practicing their principles instead of a crude mixture of addictive search quality, addictedness to bucks and PR along the lines of "Yahhooooo!".
!g is the google killer. I switched to DDG, but kept drifting back to see if Google was doing better. I find myself using !g less and less, as I get used to the result format.
At the moment, DDG reminds me of Firefox (or was it WaterSquirrel then?) back-in-the-day. Its something that "feels" better than what is the standard - and it's something that I go on and on about to other nerds, when I'm drunk ;)
I get into using DDG sometimes, then run into a batch of wanting to use !g and just switch the engine in FF and forget to come back until I read some story on HN ;)
It kind of irks me that DDG is still asking if I meant [similar sounding children's book to my business with 3 different letters] when !g stopped doing that months ago. It also has my psycho competitor's defamatory website ranking #8 when this page should have crappy SEO with google.
If I want Google results, it's a heck of a lot faster, easier, and natural to just Google it instead of adding some kind of search operator BS to my query. I used DDG for a while (a long time ago, admittedly) and basically had to !g every query I ran in order to get acceptable results. In the end, I gave up because it was just adding typing and thinking time to search.
I suppose one could argue that the interface lacks some of the annoyances of Google, but I feel like quality and speed are the most desirable traits of a search engine (in that order). If we're just using somebody else's results anyway then why should we accept a slowdown?
People care about privacy and not being tracked. I predict Google's arms race with Facebook to profit more from user's data will augment this growth. And/or dampen that arms race.
That's why I search with DuckDuckGo by default (previously Scroogle).
I certainly felt some difficulty first in setting Duck Duck Go as my default search engine. Google trains you repeatedly, implicitly, over the years on how to optimise your query for Google. I often still find myself adding "!g" to my DDG query to perform the search on Google, but at least Google isn't my first point of contact any more.
I've gotta say, Gabriel's tenacity is both admirable and inspirational. I remember long ago in its early days I tried it and shrugged it off as just another search engine, destined for failure after a few months of obscurity and being largely unknown.
It's now my default browser, and has been as of about 2 weeks ago. Gabriel has been very keen on picking up where other search site are slacking.
I realize it is in fashion to make bold claims that somehow Google destroyed its search in a monomaniacal pursuit of social, but a hyperbolic if not patently untrue story. Yes, the user interface has changed and gotten fancier and more cluttered with the introduction of toolbar and sidebar (that's been happening over years, prior to G+), but the actual organic results have not changed much at all except to improve on average, even if you take into account Search Plus Your World (which you can disable)
Shocking, but most people at Google do not work on G+, it is not the sole focus of the company, and the narrative that Google is simply dropping everything else to mindlessly chase Facebook is blogosphere fiction. There are over 30,000 employees and I would be surprised if even 2% of them worked on G+. Teams at Google are typically small and at any given time, people are working on a large number of projects. It's simply not Google's culture to mindlessly focus on a single unproven product to the detriment of others. If anything, Google is frequently criticized for doing too many new things at once, and that's what you get when you have a company run with engineering culture.
Google makes most of their money from Search and Ads. You can bet that they watch data from search quality and marketshare like a hawk, and if social was causing Google search to suck more and lose customers, you can bet they'd turn it off in a heartbeat. It's been said by some analysts that every 1% loss in search marketshare is $1 billion in revenue. Facebook isn't making that much money, and so from a cost-benefit analysis, sacrificing billions in search share revenue to try and gain social-search revenue doesn't sound rational.
It would thus be reasonable to assume, that any changes Google actually makes to core search are a) conservative b) subjected to a battery of scientific tests and c) as low risk as they can make them to their core business.
But the way you read things in the Blogosphere, Search has been radically altered. The evidence just isn't there.
It's very common these days to take many amazing products for granted. Google search is an amazing tool that suffers a lot from very vocal complaints and not enough praise. The only areas it is lacking in are those that are heavily targeted by spammers.
One of National Public Radio's (NPR) shows -- "On the Media", perhaps -- had a several minute segment on Google's privacy changes and someone who decided to "divorce" themselves from Google. They mentioned DDG as the search engine they'd switched to and commented favorably on the experience.
That's at least the second time in recent weeks that I've heard DDG mentioned on national or state public radio.
It might sound... "incidental", but those kinds of exposures really get "the masses" to go and have a look.
EDIT: Here's a reference to the "divorce" segment:
I don't much like DuckDuckGo's results. For example a search for "Minecraft" via DuckDuckGo produces:
#1 minecraft.net (official site)
#2 facebook.com/minecraft
#3 joystiq.com/game/minecraft (news blog)
#4 minecraftportal.com (minecraft blog)
#5 minecraft.en.softonic.com (a site distributing a copy of the phased out minecraft trial version)
#6 minecraftwiki.net (official Minecraft wiki)
#7 kotaku.com/minecraft/ (blog)
The #1 result makes sense and is great, but why are the rest of the top results all blogs (besides the wiki)? It seems to heavily favour blogs. The official Minecraft forum isn't even in the top 20...
I'm not exactly sure what your talking about. The results for Google's minecraft search are pretty crummy too.
#1 minecraft.net (can't tell from the search results if it's even the games real website, since there are ~.com, ~.net and ~.org sites all run by others)
#2 minecraftforfree.com (a site distributing the full version for free?!)
#3 minecraftwiki
#4 wikipedia's article
#5 pocket edition on the android app store, not even the actual website and no links to the iOS version?
#6-10 youtube videos of people playing or reviewing minecraft
#11 3 news links about minecraft
#12-13 both link to googlemapsmania articles on minecraft maps.
Oh and a nice link at the bottom about DMCA requested removal of a link (sent by Mojang at least). I imagine due to copyright/IP violations like link #2.
YMMV though due to Google's search personalisation...
The minecraft forum isn't listed until the second link on page 2. I'm not sure if you missed it but the forum is link #10 on the DDG search...
I too find that for many 'normal' (as in: mainstream) search queries, Google is much better. Certainly after the first one or two results. For coding, DuckDuckGo gives better results.
So I use duckduckgo for coding or factual matters (or wolframalpha occasionally), and Google for searching things like Minecraft or a forum or so.
I try to use DDG as much as possible though for the privacy issue. Since I started to use it (because it was the default search engine in Linux Mint and I wanted to give it a go), my average Google searches per day dropped from hundreds to a couple dozen. I imagine DuckDuckGo ones went a lot up, but they don't track that!
I use duckduckgo as my default search engine now. If i need some more info i just use g!. Really like the bang syntax!
And its doesnt track all my stuff, and this stupid google+ (failure) is not integrated. I just want to search stuff. Google did it right in the past, now duck duck go is my uberlord.
That's a fantastic looking curve, but keep in mind the absolute numbers shown. They are at 1.6 million direct queries per day. Still a ways to go to be truly competitive (3 billion per day for Google). Still, if they keep up with current growth rates, they could do some real damage.
Just one at a time is all it takes. :) Replace starfish with searches..and bend your imagination a bit.
"A man was walking along a deserted beach at sunset. As he walked he could see a young boy in the distance, as he drew nearer he noticed that the boy kept bending down, picking something up and throwing it into the water.
Time and again he kept hurling things into the ocean.
As the man approached even closer, he was able to see that the boy was picking up starfish that had been washed up on the beach and, one at a time he was throwing them back into the water.
The man asked the boy what he was doing, the boy replied,"I am throwing these washed up starfish back into the ocean, or else they will die through lack of oxygen. "But", said the man, "You can't possibly save them all, there are thousands on this beach, and this must be happening on hundreds of beaches along the coast. You can't possibly make a difference."
The boy looked down, frowning for a moment; then bent down to pick up another starfish, smiling as he threw it back into the sea. He replied,
I swapped to DDG on all of my browsers about a month ago and I've been really pleased. Like others, I find myself occasionally using !g, particularly for programming queries. Things like !so, !mdn and !msdn actually help out a lot in some of these cases, which makes me think that as I learn the bangs I'll rely on Google less and less.
pg's analysis was spot on, then [1]. I recently realized DuckDuckGo would be a hit when a hacker friend who does not read HN started using DDG as his primary search engine.
To me, this means it is out there. I switched too, at least for a while, and now I use both google and DDG, constantly having the impression that DDG's results are getting better and better.
That's consistent with our Google Analytics. Visits from DDG are up to 58 last week, up from 15 the first week in January with a steady climb. There was a dip last week over week for some reason.
Compared to Google's 38K visits for last week, they have a long way to go to make a dent. We perform better in DDG results, as well.
I've been using DuckDuckGo more and more lately since google added a redirect[1] for any link clicked in their search results a couple months ago.
I'm in China and most links I click on google don't load. Perhaps because China is messing with DNS queries to google.com and trying to limit the amount of data they collect on their citizens.
I've been using DDG for quite a few months now and in general it works well. However I still find myself adding that "!g" at times when they find no results, and seeing what I was looking for at Google. I am also a bit disappointed with the "I'm feeling ducky"-results which are rarely what a person is likely to be looking for as soon as you get more complex than one word.
But that's the negative parts, and otherwise the positive outweighs those by far. I love the bang-syntax and I found myself using their information-box directly on the search page very often, mostly for converting currency.
I think better results will come with time and increasing usage, and I wish them good luck in the future.
if i get that right, people are doing a lot more API calls than direct searches... Which begs the questions of (i) who they are, (ii) what they're doing, and (iii) how this can be monetized?
I just wish DDG could implement autocomplete/search suggestions. It's probably silly, but I've become as accustomed to typing a few letters into Google and it knowing exactly what I'm looking for as I have to tab complete in a unix terminal.
I've also really become accustomed to "instant" search. And
I'll be the first to admit I thought was a total gimmick when it was announced.
Edit: After reading what I wrote, I realized it came off as if I didn't like DDG or didn't use it. Neither of those are true. I really like DDG and use it fairly often.
It was mentioned before, but I think it's more a kind of "different" and unpersonalized search. Like proposed by Paul Graham: http://paulgraham.com/ambitious.html
[+] [-] epi0Bauqu|14 years ago|reply
In response to a lot of the comments here, please know that two major things we're working on are better programming queries (https://duckduckgo.com/tech.html -- one of my new favorites https://duckduckgo.com/?q=alternative+to+picasa) and speed.
For speed, just this week we upgraded our whole caching system, which should significantly speed up a lot of queries. I'd be interested to know if anyone has noticed any difference over the past day or so. This change should equalize a lot of the location differences, which is the main issue. In some parts of the world we were way slower.
Also, for anyone wanting to get involved we've been open sourcing more and more (https://github.com/duckduckgo). We're working on better entry points, but one could start here now: https://github.com/duckduckgo/duckduckgo/wiki. For programming documentation in particular, this is the repo: https://github.com/duckduckgo/zeroclickinfo-fathead. That will answer queries like https://duckduckgo.com/?q=perl+split
On the back-end we could also use some sysadmin help :). Here's our hiring info: http://help.duckduckgo.com/customer/portal/articles/216387
Of course, we're also always looking for feedback, the more detailed/specific the better: https://duckduckgo.com/feedback.html
[+] [-] reasonattlm|14 years ago|reply
I tend to cover any given topic in a brace of interlinked posts across years, and all topics are complex. e.g.:
https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=site%3Afightaging.org+...
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=site%3Afightaging.org+gut+bacteria
DDG misses the AGE connection in the results, which is important in this topic.
Many searches are upon specific factors or markers or genes, and for these DDG falls down badly e.g.:
https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=site%3Afightaging.org+...
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=site%3Afightaging.org+IL-1
https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=site%3Afightaging.org+...
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=site%3Afightaging.org+p27
[+] [-] thwest|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jordhy|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cpeterso|14 years ago|reply
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=alternative+to+duckduckgo
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=alternative+to+google
[+] [-] julien_p|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thecombjelly|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dredmorbius|14 years ago|reply
I'll also note that what you serve in day ... is about what Google serves in a minute.
http://www.quora.com/How-many-search-queries-does-Google-ser...
[+] [-] freddot|14 years ago|reply
Thanks for this
[+] [-] memset|14 years ago|reply
I really really like the "alternative to" feature. What could I do to help you get better at alternatives which are not as popular? (eg, "alternative to cheetahmail" or "alternative to grubhub" or "alternative to xkcd"?)
Also, what kind of feedback would you need to help improve the tech-related searches? Like "ebcdic table" or "1010 in hex"?
[+] [-] white_devil|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] didip|14 years ago|reply
And I didn't know that DDG is written in Perl, good looking Perl too.
[+] [-] umjames|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gsvolt7|14 years ago|reply
DDG comes as default in Trisquel with web browser, Midori. I usually keep Javascript disabled.
Actually DDG's javascript less search result is in my opinion the best thing I appreciate about DDG.
Thanks for your hard work. I'll see if I can contribute to the project in any way I can.
[+] [-] mcmonkey|14 years ago|reply
Thought it was an awesome name and had to check it out, and since I was already considering switching from google it was good timing.
keep up the good work =)
[+] [-] iusable|14 years ago|reply
Any chance of integrated media galleries? I think Bing & Google are really effin this up.
[+] [-] unknown|14 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jsz0|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] abc_lisper|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] geoffw8|14 years ago|reply
After seeing them pop up here once or twice quite recently I thought I'd give it a go, I opened up preferences in Chrome and switched my default search over to DDG. It felt good, made a nice change but was certainly a bit "odd". I found what I wanted, most of the time albeit it with a slight drop in quality vs Google.
But my biggest gripe with them was confidence. I'd just started out at a new job as a programmer and as you can imagine, I was searching for a good few things, usually things I was struggling with and I just didn't feel sure that I was getting the best results I possibly could be. You might think thats totally crazy, but when your battling an issue as many of you know, you want more than anything to work out whats going on. I didn't have any margin for error, I wanted the best results right there that second.
Specifics aside, knowing that Google is far superior in their results makes it real difficult to use another search engine really, extra features (!so etc) or no extra features. I personally search because I need to "find" something and I usually don't know where that something is, opening up Stack Overflow isn't that much of a chore for me. Its the other bit I need help with.
Anyway, I commend their mission and hope they succeed in taking a fair slice of the market. I think he's a great entrepreneur and I wish him the best of luck. I can't imagine what it must be like to be head on with... Google.
[+] [-] stroboskop|14 years ago|reply
As for the Google part, right now it's probably just an alarmist prediction, but it's going to be fun to watch un/fold. Especially if DuckDuckGo and other engines continue to get better while practicing their principles instead of a crude mixture of addictive search quality, addictedness to bucks and PR along the lines of "Don't be evil".
[+] [-] coderdude|14 years ago|reply
Google is definitely pulling users from Yahoo. By mimicking Alta Vista, Yahoo has lost its mojo. Stepped right into the "portal" honeypot. No news. The more interesting thing is the fantastic feeling more and more people have: that Alta Vista and Yahoo will take eachother down the spiral.
As for the Yahoo part, right now it's probably just an alarmist prediction, but it's going to be fun to watch un/fold. Especially if Google and other engines continue to get better while practicing their principles instead of a crude mixture of addictive search quality, addictedness to bucks and PR along the lines of "Yahhooooo!".
[+] [-] mrspeaker|14 years ago|reply
At the moment, DDG reminds me of Firefox (or was it WaterSquirrel then?) back-in-the-day. Its something that "feels" better than what is the standard - and it's something that I go on and on about to other nerds, when I'm drunk ;)
[+] [-] praxeologist|14 years ago|reply
It kind of irks me that DDG is still asking if I meant [similar sounding children's book to my business with 3 different letters] when !g stopped doing that months ago. It also has my psycho competitor's defamatory website ranking #8 when this page should have crappy SEO with google.
[+] [-] phlyingpenguin|14 years ago|reply
If I want Google results, it's a heck of a lot faster, easier, and natural to just Google it instead of adding some kind of search operator BS to my query. I used DDG for a while (a long time ago, admittedly) and basically had to !g every query I ran in order to get acceptable results. In the end, I gave up because it was just adding typing and thinking time to search.
I suppose one could argue that the interface lacks some of the annoyances of Google, but I feel like quality and speed are the most desirable traits of a search engine (in that order). If we're just using somebody else's results anyway then why should we accept a slowdown?
[+] [-] pierrebouchet|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kylek|14 years ago|reply
Phoenix -> FireBird -> FireFox :)
[+] [-] spodek|14 years ago|reply
That's why I search with DuckDuckGo by default (previously Scroogle).
[+] [-] RichClaxton|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jackery|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mise|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jimmyjim|14 years ago|reply
It's now my default browser, and has been as of about 2 weeks ago. Gabriel has been very keen on picking up where other search site are slacking.
[+] [-] cromwellian|14 years ago|reply
Time Bandits is #8
vs https://www.google.com/#hl=en&output=search&q=the+mo...
First hit.
I realize it is in fashion to make bold claims that somehow Google destroyed its search in a monomaniacal pursuit of social, but a hyperbolic if not patently untrue story. Yes, the user interface has changed and gotten fancier and more cluttered with the introduction of toolbar and sidebar (that's been happening over years, prior to G+), but the actual organic results have not changed much at all except to improve on average, even if you take into account Search Plus Your World (which you can disable)
Shocking, but most people at Google do not work on G+, it is not the sole focus of the company, and the narrative that Google is simply dropping everything else to mindlessly chase Facebook is blogosphere fiction. There are over 30,000 employees and I would be surprised if even 2% of them worked on G+. Teams at Google are typically small and at any given time, people are working on a large number of projects. It's simply not Google's culture to mindlessly focus on a single unproven product to the detriment of others. If anything, Google is frequently criticized for doing too many new things at once, and that's what you get when you have a company run with engineering culture.
Google makes most of their money from Search and Ads. You can bet that they watch data from search quality and marketshare like a hawk, and if social was causing Google search to suck more and lose customers, you can bet they'd turn it off in a heartbeat. It's been said by some analysts that every 1% loss in search marketshare is $1 billion in revenue. Facebook isn't making that much money, and so from a cost-benefit analysis, sacrificing billions in search share revenue to try and gain social-search revenue doesn't sound rational.
It would thus be reasonable to assume, that any changes Google actually makes to core search are a) conservative b) subjected to a battery of scientific tests and c) as low risk as they can make them to their core business.
But the way you read things in the Blogosphere, Search has been radically altered. The evidence just isn't there.
[+] [-] krelian|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pasbesoin|14 years ago|reply
That's at least the second time in recent weeks that I've heard DDG mentioned on national or state public radio.
It might sound... "incidental", but those kinds of exposures really get "the masses" to go and have a look.
EDIT: Here's a reference to the "divorce" segment:
http://www.onthemedia.org/2012/mar/23/divorcing-google/
[+] [-] citricsquid|14 years ago|reply
#1 minecraft.net (official site) #2 facebook.com/minecraft #3 joystiq.com/game/minecraft (news blog) #4 minecraftportal.com (minecraft blog) #5 minecraft.en.softonic.com (a site distributing a copy of the phased out minecraft trial version) #6 minecraftwiki.net (official Minecraft wiki) #7 kotaku.com/minecraft/ (blog)
The #1 result makes sense and is great, but why are the rest of the top results all blogs (besides the wiki)? It seems to heavily favour blogs. The official Minecraft forum isn't even in the top 20...
[+] [-] xemoka|14 years ago|reply
#1 minecraft.net (can't tell from the search results if it's even the games real website, since there are ~.com, ~.net and ~.org sites all run by others) #2 minecraftforfree.com (a site distributing the full version for free?!) #3 minecraftwiki #4 wikipedia's article #5 pocket edition on the android app store, not even the actual website and no links to the iOS version? #6-10 youtube videos of people playing or reviewing minecraft #11 3 news links about minecraft #12-13 both link to googlemapsmania articles on minecraft maps.
Oh and a nice link at the bottom about DMCA requested removal of a link (sent by Mojang at least). I imagine due to copyright/IP violations like link #2.
YMMV though due to Google's search personalisation...
The minecraft forum isn't listed until the second link on page 2. I'm not sure if you missed it but the forum is link #10 on the DDG search...
[+] [-] lucb1e|14 years ago|reply
So I use duckduckgo for coding or factual matters (or wolframalpha occasionally), and Google for searching things like Minecraft or a forum or so.
I try to use DDG as much as possible though for the privacy issue. Since I started to use it (because it was the default search engine in Linux Mint and I wanted to give it a go), my average Google searches per day dropped from hundreds to a couple dozen. I imagine DuckDuckGo ones went a lot up, but they don't track that!
[+] [-] TeeWEE|14 years ago|reply
And its doesnt track all my stuff, and this stupid google+ (failure) is not integrated. I just want to search stuff. Google did it right in the past, now duck duck go is my uberlord.
[+] [-] Gobitron|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joshmlewis|14 years ago|reply
"A man was walking along a deserted beach at sunset. As he walked he could see a young boy in the distance, as he drew nearer he noticed that the boy kept bending down, picking something up and throwing it into the water. Time and again he kept hurling things into the ocean.
As the man approached even closer, he was able to see that the boy was picking up starfish that had been washed up on the beach and, one at a time he was throwing them back into the water.
The man asked the boy what he was doing, the boy replied,"I am throwing these washed up starfish back into the ocean, or else they will die through lack of oxygen. "But", said the man, "You can't possibly save them all, there are thousands on this beach, and this must be happening on hundreds of beaches along the coast. You can't possibly make a difference." The boy looked down, frowning for a moment; then bent down to pick up another starfish, smiling as he threw it back into the sea. He replied,
"I made a huge difference to that one!""
[+] [-] wraith4000|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] reginaldo|14 years ago|reply
To me, this means it is out there. I switched too, at least for a while, and now I use both google and DDG, constantly having the impression that DDG's results are getting better and better.
[1] http://paulgraham.com/ambitious.html
[+] [-] ekalvi|14 years ago|reply
Compared to Google's 38K visits for last week, they have a long way to go to make a dent. We perform better in DDG results, as well.
[+] [-] jzycrzy|14 years ago|reply
I'm in China and most links I click on google don't load. Perhaps because China is messing with DNS queries to google.com and trying to limit the amount of data they collect on their citizens.
[1] The google link for duckduckgo search result first hits this link, and this is where the pageload errors occur: http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&#...
[+] [-] Zirro|14 years ago|reply
But that's the negative parts, and otherwise the positive outweighs those by far. I love the bang-syntax and I found myself using their information-box directly on the search page very often, mostly for converting currency.
I think better results will come with time and increasing usage, and I wish them good luck in the future.
[+] [-] PaulHoule|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MitziMoto|14 years ago|reply
I've also really become accustomed to "instant" search. And I'll be the first to admit I thought was a total gimmick when it was announced.
Edit: After reading what I wrote, I realized it came off as if I didn't like DDG or didn't use it. Neither of those are true. I really like DDG and use it fairly often.
[+] [-] rbarooah|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] uriloran|14 years ago|reply