Privacy focused search engine DuckDuckGo surpasses 10 million daily queries

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in internet on (#DJBY)
DuckDuckGo announced they hit a milestone, surpassing the 10 million daily query mark on June 22, 2015. DuckDuckGo saw 10,218,617 queries on June 22nd alone. The company gives credit to that surge in users based on them being a privacy focused search engine. Gabriel Weinberg wrote, "we're proud to be helping so many people take back their privacy." DuckDuckGo has grown 600% since Edward Snowden's NSA surveillance news broke two years ago. And yet only a few percent of people have even heard of DuckDuckGo and other private alternatives.

Founded in 2008 by Gabriel Weinberg, DuckDuckGo is based in Paoli, Pennsylvania rather than Silicon Valley. The site, which does not track user data, now handles some 3bn searches a year - although that is only about the same volume that Google processes in 24 hours. Since last year, it has been a built-in search option in both Safari and Firefox. The site also promises to provide the information users want with fewer clicks through features such as instant answers, themes and !bangs. DuckDuckGo hopes these other features will help it continue to build on the audience gained from people looking for more private ways to search the web following the Snowden revelations.
Reply 8 comments

Or, more recently... (Score: 1)

by reziac@pipedot.org on 2015-07-07 15:06 (#DJVH)

...the fact that IXQuick/Startpage fucked with their interface, making it unusable without javascript, and by the time they fixed it, no doubt many others like myself had migrated to DDG, never to return.

Re: Or, more recently... (Score: 1, Informative)

by Anonymous Coward on 2015-07-09 13:14 (#DSQB)

The "never to return" part will be true for me when the quality of results comes anywhere near that of google. DDG is nice and yields good stuff sometimes (and their image search is way better), but you just can't find some stuff.

Re: Or, more recently... (Score: 0)

by Anonymous Coward on 2015-07-13 16:39 (#E6E0)

Yeah the search quality is poor and far too censored by default. Startpage is much, much better (because it uses Google of course).

Agreed that the new Startpage interface is godforsaken and there is STILL no replacement mobile interface, which is insane.

This redesign death spiral seems to be the way with every last web site, even useful and technically sound and aware ones like Lifehacker or, well, Slashdot. :)

Speaking of which, I don't visit there much any more but the overall quality seems to have gotten MUCH worse. Clearly the hordes haven't come here. Did all the decent people (present company excluded) just stop posting on the Internet?

!bang away (Score: 3, Interesting)

by ginguin@pipedot.org on 2015-07-07 17:53 (#DKDX)

The !bang feature is one of the things I have grown to love. With a simple !, letter combo, and search phrase, I can be where I want to be, looking up what I want to look up. Sure, I may want to use Google occasionally, but I don't have to open up Google to do it. !g and I am searching Google directly. There are hundreds of the things (but I only use 8 or 9 of them). !am pops you into Amazon with the search terms selected. !alpha gives you Wolfram|Alpha. On and on, it's quick and easy and versatile.

The privacy aspects are a (not unimportant) bonus.

Re: !bang away (Score: 2, Informative)

by patrick@pipedot.org on 2015-07-14 07:09 (#E8CC)

!wa is the quickest !bang for Wolfram|Alpha*. For anyone not using DDG yet, you can see all the !bangs here. I only use a few as well, but it's extremely powerful to be able to search other sites directly from any DDG bar.

Recently I tend to use
!w (Wikipedia)
!v (DDG's video search)
!wa (WolframAlpha)
!w3s (w3schools)

I still use Google's stuff, but find it easier to use DDG's search bar, since you can just type to search & get to any of them directly (no mouse required).
!yt (for something I know is on YouTube)
!m (Google Maps, since !osm OpenStreetMap doesn't work well where I live)
!n (Google news)
!g (Google. I find plain DDG to be better than Google for most queries, but if I need the answer to a specific question that will be on an obscure forum somewhere, Google is still better at finding those).

*(!wra, !wolfram, !alpha, !walpha, !wolframalpha also search WolframaAlpha)

alternatives are good but... (Score: 1)

by gravis@pipedot.org on 2015-07-08 05:43 (#DMWY)

while it's good there are alternatives, there are good reasons google handles 90% of search engine requests.

Re: alternatives are good but... (Score: 3, Interesting)

by evilviper@pipedot.org on 2015-07-08 08:19 (#DN87)

there are good reasons google handles 90% of search engine requests.
Bing+Yahoo has about 30%, while Google is staying under 65%. These guys do well because they have brand recognition, and because they pay-out huge sums of money to get their search engines used by default in browsers, phones, apps, etc., where people can't or just don't choose to change them. Obviously the smaller guys are at a huge disadvantage to attract eyeballs.

Meanwhile, the smaller guys actually return better search results, and have innovative ideas that are quite useful. Years ago, I switched to Clusty because the automatic categories listed in the sidebar made it extremely easy to narrow down searches with a click. DDG does a watered-down version of that, but also has often-useful instant answers at the top, so you don't have to click-through to anything at all. Clusty got worse, and got bought-out by some religious-right group. DDG continues to returns better search results, in part because it more aggressively filters out spammy sites that flood Google.

I will be eternally grateful to Google for massively improving on the worthless mess that was search engines. They single-handedly took the internet out of the cesspool, where searching for articles on Rhinos turned up porn and warez sites at the top of the list... But Google has been going in the wrong direction since then, and others have taken-up the torch and run with it.

Re: alternatives are good but... (Score: 1, Informative)

by Anonymous Coward on 2015-07-08 11:40 (#DNSN)

They single-handedly took the internet out of the cesspool, where searching for articles on Rhinos turned up porn and warez sites at the top of the list...
So true. I remember when to get anything useful out of Altavista you had to iterate your search multiple times, each time adding more Boolean exclusions like -xxx -warez -"top 50".