I've been kicking the tires on DuckDuckGo for several months now, and while it is ever improving, Google's results are still more relevant.
Still, I totally think DDG is on Google's radar, and while CEO Eric Schmidt has stated Bing is their competition (and they are) they have to wonder about about DDG's logarithmic rise in popularity.
I got downvoted the last time I posted this (love you HNers) but DDG states they're more than just a skinned Bing: https://duck.co/help/results/sources
I'm sorry but I have big problems with calling DDG a real search engine. Their page states "DuckDuckGo is a search engine like Google." BS. It's a meta search engine that relies on other real search engines, such as Bing, to get the results. If ever becomes a threat to Bing, they'll cut them off in a second. DDG doesn't do the hard and resource-intensive work of crawling and ranking the pages, they just tweak the results of others in ways that gets them publicity on tech blogs.
This article prompted me to do likewise. For the past 24 hours and running, I have used Duck Duck Go exclusively instead of Google. It is like a breath of fresh air. I tried DDG a few months back and it was a bit on the rough side. It has made tremendous strides in the intervening time.
As for Google, they have gone past their prime. As the other comments note, 2008 was the peak. Yahoo is in the midst of what may be the longest running identity crisis ever to hit a company. And the name of the game for both Google and Bing is to keep you on their site with their advertisements for as long as they possibly can. Like some tentacled monster, they don't want to just serve you and let you go. The cheap tricks masquerading as a flashy UI ruin the user experience and make me not want to go back. Duck Duck Go actually keeps you coming by serving salient information (aka 'value') and then lets you get on with life. Kinda reminds me of the difference between the personality ethic and the character ethic from Covey's 7HHEP.
This was a great post. Thanks for putting it forward.
DuckDuckGo's results are a compilation of "over 400" sources, including Yahoo! Search BOSS; Wikipedia; Wolfram Alpha; Bing; its own Web crawler (the DuckDuckBot); and others. It also uses data from crowdsourced sites, including Wikipedia, to populate "Zero-click Info" boxes – grey boxes above the results that display topic summaries and related topics.
"DuckDuckGo gets its results from over one hundred sources, including DuckDuckBot (our own crawler), crowd-sourced sites (like Wikipedia, which are stored in our own index), Yahoo! (through BOSS), Yandex, WolframAlpha, Yelp, and Bing."
I also don't see "we don't track" as a liability, given that Google themselves get relatively little by way of relevance from profiling (though it may contribute to ad sales). Rather (and this is straight from a Google engineer): "It's really hard to do much better in search advertising than current query + location."
I think it's probably that DDG does a better job at marketing themselves. Whenever there is any sort of privacy scandal there always seems to be some comment from their PR dept.
Personally, I am highly skeptical regarding DDG and find much of their marketing to be hyperbolic (see the duck.com foolishness [0]). For me, I feel that if I'm just going to get Bing search results and Bing ads, I might as well just use Bing.
To my knowledge duck duck go uses Bing's search API to get their results. To me Bing and Google have not been sufficient for my searching needs and the needs of a large group around me for a long time now.
On a separate but related issue because DDG is using Bing the overall experience is lackluster, as other user's have noted
things like very slow to re-index new results, new information climbs up to the top very slowly and often times I have to switch off their search with a ! command to get my results because they just aren't working. But if I have to do that I'd rather be on that other search site entirely.
To be fair google also for the last few years has also started providing a very lack luster search experience and using dark patterns around their results to get you to click ads.
They all kind of suck.
My opinion is biased though because I'm currently working on a new search engine to solve these things.
My understanding is that Duck Duck Go is more or less a non personalized Bing search with paid upranking for Amazon products. As it is Bing is pretty solid, though the privacy boost DDG provides is not worth the drop in quality.
I'm aware that DDG relies heavily on Bing. But that only highlights the dynamic at play: the issue hasn't been technical elements of delivering search results, but providing a compelling case to switch.
There's the additional situation that I'm absolutely no fan of Microsoft and trust them to my search data even less than I do Google. Handing either my queries via anonymizing proxies is rather more palatable, however.
DDG's share of search is still small, but its growth rate is on fire. It also seems to be largely organic (today's announcement by Apple would be an exception to this), which strikes me as generally more persuasive than growth driven by various sorts of gimmickery (see the extensive manipulations of web server stats Microsoft attempted through the years largely through changing parked domain hosting status).
Do you have a reference for search engine ranking? I'm not turning up any clear stats, though from Fool.com I get a reference to 4.7 million queries/day vs. 3 billion for Google. That puts DDG at 1/640th Google's traffic, though as I said: growing quickly.
Presumably you count DuckDuckGo as a "Bing syndicate". I think that doesn't do it justice - many of the things I like about DDG are specific to DDG, and I could not care less whether the underlying crawl was run by Bing or not.
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