DuckDuckGo Traffic (opens in new tab)

The results are good enough at that I use it exclusively now.

In case y'all didn't know, DDG does some neat things like this:

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=beautify+json&t=h_&ia=answer

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=qr+hello+hn&atb=v123-2__&ia=answer

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=url+unescape+Hello%2520HN&atb=v123...

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=crontab+0+0+*+*+*+%2Fbin%2Fsh&atb=...

I have recently switched to Firefox, and have been using DDG now for some time both on desktop and mobile.

In my experience Firefox + DDG is a viable alternative to Chrome + Google Search.

Occasionally I still need to go for google, but for about 98% of the time I'd say DDG is a no-op drop-in replacement for Google. I highly recommend this browser & search engine combo - DDG is great now, and Firefox is now decent again after a while in the wilderness.

Firefox also has some neat extensions like Google Container [1] that sandboxes all google cookies so you can still login to Gmail etc, but the cookies are not available for tracking elsewhere (e.g. analytics). I've recommended this add-on a lot recently - I've got no connection to it, just a satisfied user.

1 - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/google-contai...

I wish this had better branding. You can't say "just DuckDuckGo it". It has to have a single, or at most a double-syllable name that is easy to remember. Like Google or Bing.

But maybe it's part of some sort of strategy where in the early years the branding is weird in order to gain notoriety, and then change it when the timing is right.

I think right now this is probably slowing growth. I wonder how much would duck.com cost.

DDG, if you're reading this:

I want to make the switch.

But typing "!g" when a search does not return what I want is too clumsy. It requires 7 touch-events on mobile (including focus and space).

Please make that simpler, and I will switch.

(My suggestion would be to have a "!g" button at the bottom of the search results. Perhaps make it optional, depending on user-settings; I don't mind a cookie for just that.)

I've been using DuckDuckGo for more than a year now and barely use other search engines. It's the default on all the devices that I use.

I am so happy to be a user and be part of their growth as well.

The only thing that could improve it would be searches in other languages, I still don't get a good result when I search in other languages such as Russian, Persian, Arabic, etc..

Thank you DuckDuckGo for the great service <3

Nowhere on the page does it say "exploding", OP is exaggerating what is roughly linear growth. I think the title should be edited.

Edit: To be clear, I'm not saying this is not worth posting or should be taken down, just "exploding" does not even remotely describe DDG's traffic. The post was interesting, only OP's fabricated title is inaccurate.

Edit 2: Several comments mention the graph does show daily searches, and is therefore showing exponential growth. My reason for thinking it's cumulative and not daily, is because it says below that the daily record is 29 million searches and that the cumulative number is 22.569 billion. When hovering over the last value in the graph, it shows 22.2 billion.

For the record, the current title is "DuckDuckGo Usage is exploding right now".

So, I set Firefox to use DDG rather than Google as its default search engine a little while ago. And, reading this discussion, I realised that I'd like to see a complete list of "bang" searches DDG knows how to do.

Putting "duckduckgo bang" into DDG itself produces results that are ... not helpful. At any rate, nothing on the first page looks like it has any chance of answering the question.

But "!g duckduckgo bang" gives me https://duckduckgo.com/bang as the first hit (this is a high-level description of the bang feature), followed by https://duckduckgo.com/bang_lite.html (which has the actual complete list right there), followed by someone's list of the 25 allegedly-most-useful DDG bangs. Most of the rest of the first-page hits are also informative -- they're things like Reddit and HN discussions of the bang features.

I think this is actually the clearest case I've seen since switching to DDG where Google had demonstrably more useful results. Which is kinda ironic.

Alright, I'm going to give it another go. Tried a few years back and ended up !g to the end of almost every search

I liked all the other functionality a lot, but the results themselves just didn't work for me.

A really underrated feature of DuckDuckGo is the number/quality of search cards[0]. A lot of Google's search cards just kind of pull from whatever the top result is -- but DuckDuckGo's all have specific algorithms which makes them more predictable.

With Google, I have to take an extra second to think about why they're showing an answer at the top. But if DuckDuckGo inlines an answer from StackOverflow, I know what the algorithm is --> Get top-rated StackOverflow result, get highest rated answer, inline the first X paragraphs, give a button to expand.

I still occasionally use !g for some searches if I strike out finding answers on DuckDuckGo, but I'm at the point where I generally prefer DuckDuckGo's answers. It's really tough to explain what's different about them, it feels like DuckDuckGo has a different "style" of search results or something. Even when I'm using Google, I usually have DuckDuckGo open next to it, because Google and DuckDuckGo feel like they cover different ground.

It's just that by default, the ground that DuckDuckGo is covering feels more relevant for just very quickly getting information and then getting out (especially with the better search cards).

[0]: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=javascript+char+codes&t=canonical&...

I've switched all my devices to ddg and Firefox. Automatically logging me into Chrome was just emotionally too much, even if it did not send a single extra bit to Google.

I miss the summary responses at the top of search results because they made Google much more of a reference. For example, defining words, quick view of Wikipedia results, etc.

I do still use maps, for now.

Still use google for “150 usd to cad” conversions. Use it for translation. Use it for relevant news. Use it for accurate localized searches. Use it for finding relevant sourcing of companies. Calling DuckDuckGo a replacement of google is no where near right. Bing is more relevant. And people seem to hate on Bing. The only reason people love DuckDuckGo is because of the perceived privacy. But the NSA blows that right away.

What is DDG’s business model?

I've been using DuckDuckGo as my primary search engine for almost a year now. I still need to resort to !g for about 1/3 of my queries, which is less than it used to be, so the quality is definitely improving.

One weird thing that I noticed is that every so often when I'm in a Google SERP (e.g. in a friend's phone) and I'm not fully satisfied with the results, I add in !g, only to realize that makes no sense. So I wonder if there's a subset of queries that DDG produces better results for, or if Google's search quality is declining.

If anyone from DDG is reading this: Please add the ability to (voluntarily) personalize search results via a cookie, just like you do for the interface theme. Something like "Programming Language: JavaScript". That way ambiguous queries (e.g "array reverse") can be associated with the specific context without having to type it every time (e.g. "array reverse js")

I'm really amazed by the adoption of DDG by HN crowd. It's totally unusable for me. I can barely find stuff and I have to resort to google in 95% of cases. Do I have to relearn how to goo.. scratch that, duck duck go stuff?

20 years ago Google Search was met with similar enthusiasm. I like DDG, but I don't see any reason why they would not pursue profits increase path once they become No 1 search engine.

Explain? Graph looks like you could say that at any point in time

It's really the best display of what gifted modern developers can do with Perl and why Perl is actually still a uniquely powerful language.

And people trust XYZ website because? Okay, whatever reasons you have, I deny. They want money, and they'll take it as it comes like anyone else. Quit being a sap.

But in any case it's really creepy how every time this website is mentioned its whole marketing department seems to show up. "I use DDG exclusively now..." Good for you.

What is DDG's business model?

Why not StartPage?

Yeah, I would use it if they change their name. IT feels like kid came up with it.

I use DDG on my phone, still Google on my desktop.

While there are a lot of things to like about DDG, the searches are still pretty rubbish.

What's worst about DDG is that it is absolutely useless at location searches.

The one that really bugs me is "Nottingham Weather". Location set to UK, yet it returns the weather for White March, MD

Nottingham, population 700,000, but somehow a road in White Marsh, MD, America, population 9,513, is the result it shows.

If I'm searching a venue, pub, club, etc. with United Kingdom set, it usually returns US bars or venues with the same name.

Anything technical Google is also much better at filtering the dross and returning something meaningful, though that might be because it's learnt the programming languages, etc. I use.

I've tried it, and wasn't pleased with search results. I'd consistently try vague searches, not find it on DDG, but it'd be the top result on Google.

I'll give it another swing, we need some viable alternatives.

I think it's absolutely fascinating how different people's opinions of DDG are.

Personally I find it perfectly adequate and I literally never resort to searching on Google.

Lots of people in this thread agree, but lots of others totally disagree.

What is so different about different people's search habits that make it good enough for some but not for otherS?

Google claims 3.5 billion queries per day, so approaching 1% of that.

I hope its another sign of rising privacy awareness ...

A while ago I switched to duckduckgo.com for a while until I applied for an ESTA visa and wasn't paying attention. I shouldn't have gone for the top result, I know... On my flight to the US my bank received already three fraudulent creditcard transactions. Banks from my country are very quick though and froze everything. However, it makes me realize personally that ranking algorithms are important, especially if you're in a hurry.

PS: The governmental site is now at rank 1 on duckduckgo.

It's good for everyone that DDG usage is increasing, however, the lack of any kinks, sudden slope increases in the graph tells me weren't any particular set of events that caused people to switch. Rather, they got "fed up with google" at their own pace, and it wasn't any one particular thing that Google did that caused a mass exodus.

That's sad, really, because it means people as a large group don't care about any particular anti-privacy thing that Google did. I would be interesting to see in a few months whether the current Chrome fiasco will have had any effect, but I doubt it.

I was using Duck Duck Go exclusively on all of my Macs, but I'm back to Google.

The reason for the change is that Duck Duck Go disabled its tracker blocking in Safari.

I read the explanation from DDG's web site, and it seemed to boil down to something like the new version of Safari would require people to opt-in to DDG's tracker blocking, and since that would be confusing for people, it's gone.

Well, anti-tracking is the whole reason people use DDG, both the search engine, and the privacy plug-in.

I hope someone else steps up to the plate.

I also suggest trying searx: https://asciimoo.github.io/searx/

You can use one of the online instances (with no guarantees on privacy), or just host it yourself. I set it up on my PC recently and it's "good enough" for me. Furthermore it likely has more features than DDG and startpage.

Serious question: why does everyone trust DuckDuckGo?

I'm happy to switch to DDG from Evil Google, but what stops them from becoming as "evil" as Google at some point? It's a for-profit organization relying on ads and sure - its selling point now is privacy but other than the word of the author, what else is there that at some point when it grows enough it won't start to slowly break that promise? Why is it not open source/federated? Why has it stopped the DuckDuckHack project (which was the bit that was open source)? This is probably the one search engine that has been able to gain a lot of privacy-centered/hacky individuals mostly (I think, may be wrong) through marketing/PR. If the causes are really that privacy centered, why not restructure it as non-profit + open source + decentralized? Not saying it's easy, but the marketing part (which I consider equally or even more difficult - see Bing with all MS budget and efforts), has already gathered a lot of interest for such a project.

The strength of privacy on DDG is also its weakness. Since everyone gets the same results on all searches, there is no localization to any of it. I gave it a try earlier this year but just couldn’t make it work and switched back to Google.

Curious how much data they are covering and what kind of stack is powering DuckDuckGo? Anyone knows in-depth except highscalability article.

Inspires hope :) I realize I'm unsure what DDGs main source of income is? Still ads but not personalized?

When can I get my privacy first @duckduckgo email address?

I really want to love DuckDuckGo, but for programming things I search for the results are simply to weak.

Search "go vs rust" and set the filter to the "past month" in both Google and DuckDuckGo. I can go on and on, but this is just a simple evidence of how inferior DuckDuckGo is. Also DuckDuckGo is incapable of indexing client-side rendered HTML which has become increasingly important over the past few years.

EDIT: I would like to hear any logical response from those who downvote me

I changed my default from Google Search to DDG in February. Surprised by how little I’ve noticed the change, after nearly 20 years using Google.

It feels more like the old Google that wasn’t stuffed with ads, and I find it superior for programming queries (aside from Angular 2+ docs).

I still type in google.com and perform queries there a few times a week. I also turn to Google Images for copyleft photos, as DDG doesn’t seem to support filtering by license yet.

I think where Google really shines (in addition to its personalized results) is tackling _vague_ searches with ease.

The other day, I couldn't remember what the title of a food-y documentary show I had watched on Netflix was - so I googled "netflix food show asian host." It's the first result on Google and a direct link to its Netflix page (as opposed to a blog or something). On DuckDuckGo, it's not listed at all. There's definitely room for improvement.

While 20m searches per day is impressive in a vacuum, it's more or less a rounding error on Google's numbers.

My son saw me using DDG instead of Google, asked me about it and one week later I saw he had installed it on his laptop. He also tells everyone at his school about DDG.

About six months ago, Google began presenting unsolvable Captchas on iOS/Safari while using a VPN (Private Internet Access). DDG just works.

I'd tried DDG a while back and Google seemed massively better, but I've been more impressed lately.

The "bangs" feature never appealed to me much because I already have ~25 custom search engines in Firefox that I have keywords set to.

I've been trying Qwant (Lite) recently as a Google alternative, and it's pretty good, but I find myself searching for the things like "500 mxn in usd" or "30 days from 29 sep 2018, and Qwant doesn't answer these. It looks like DDG's "instant answers" does do this, so I'm going to try it again.

I also like the appearance options, such as setting your own font, so I can use Source Sans Pro, and that it shows a MapBox/OpenStreetMap map, but you can set it to open directions in Google (or Bing or OSM).

A combination of Google's results degrading so miserably in the last few years and DDG's improvement to image search results (more pages of them and better filtering options) led me to use it much more regularly.

At this point it's less that DDG has noticeably better results now but rather Google's results for enough queries are useless to me that some alternative may as well be used.

Edit: edited out digression on the quality of Google's results since it's hardly anything that hasn't been written about prior.

Except for searches on Google Scholar, ddg is my primary search engine. Very few times have I found that I get better results in Google.

I’ve been using DDG for 8 years now based on Salvatore Sanfilippo’s (of Redis fame) recommendation, but unlike him I hardly ever resort to !google

https://usesthis.com/interviews/salvatore.sanfilippo/

I switched a week ago! But I must say I still have to hitup Google quite often, the search results are not as good.

Since this is a DDG thread, I just wanna highlight a thing I did in vim recently

Using vim you may know you can define the `keywordprg` to use when pressing `K` on a word (in command mode). This is going to, if able, show you some form of documentation

Python is already using `pydoc` in this case.

I wanted something for the other instances, and I wanted to try getting DDG to be an ok solution, since it has that Q&A view.

Here's what I ended up with (for now, surely evolving -- not perfect)

note: you could put this in a ftdetect/javascript or whatever directory, but this is to be generalized for my case, and so I use an autocmd:

  autocmd Filetype * if &ft!="python" && &ft!="vim"
    \ | let &l:keywordprg=fnamemodify($MYVIMRC, ":h") . "/search.sh " . &l:filetype | endif

Sorta ugly but hey, I don't want to overwrite the keywordprg used by python and vim (if you're parsing a vim plugin you did not write, you may want to press K on a thing to understand what it is)

And in your your vimrc's root you'll need `search.sh` with these contents:

  # searches the filetype & keyword
  # in case of multiple filetypes (javascript.jsx) we just use the first

  firefox "https://duckduckgo.com/?q=$(echo $1| cut -d'.' -f1)+$2"

Cool, now press K on a thing and assuming you use firefox, hopefully the results are OK, heh. It could be improved.

As an example I just pressed `K` on the word `import` in a `javascript` file:

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=javascript+import&atb=v132-3_j&ia=...

If you're using another browser, you could probably just use `x-www-browser` in place of firefox, to launch your default browser (in the case of linux)

I love that they make their traffic numbers available. I have been using ddg and graphing/predicting the next days traffic since March here: https://qunc.co/ddg.

Definitely a different trajectory since late summer.

I would like to switch but the search results for German language queries are too subpar as of now.

Yesterday my dad mentioned off-hand that he had switched to duckduckgo. While they are still less than a rounding error of all search traffic (this site says Google itself has 3.5bn daily searches https://www.internetlivestats.com/google-search-statistics/), it interested me to know that someone I know outside of the technosphere had learned about it and decided to change due to its privacy merits.

Also makes me wonder if the implication is that DDG may be poised to become the choice among older, conservative users and whether that will influence the way it markets itself.

As a search alternative I've really enjoyed using searx [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Searx ] instances for the past 6 months or so. Searx, like DDG, aggregates from search providers including Google, Bing, (Wikipedia, DDG, etc.)b ut you can customise it to control exactly which search providers it pulls from. And it has !shortcuts to quickly specify individual search providers, like !ddg for DDG. Source code available: https://github.com/asciimoo/searx

DDG is the default search engine in Tor browser, which explains at least my personal DDG usage. Google is also becoming less likeable as a whole, and people in general are more concerned about their privacy than before.

Wrote this before and writing again, but DDG is abysmal when it comes to non-English language searches, at least according to my experience with using it in Japanese. I’ve switched to StartPage in places where I can (unfortunately SP isn’t in the default search engine list of many mobile browsers). Perhaps in English it’s good enough to not prepend every search with !g, but it’s still quite far from that point in JP. I keep wondering what kind of staffing they have for improving non-English language searches, if any at all.

Is there a way to exclude results that don't actually contain all of the search terms? For example, results for +chicken +neutrino should not include this [1] because the word chicken isn't there. Quotes and plus signs both fail this everywhere I know of in 2018.

[1] https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2012/06/once-again-physicist...

I just encountered this as I was having issues with google results. I thought maybe something is wrong with google and people are switching yo duckduckgo.

Seriously I just searched something on google and second page of results are total crap. When I switch to duckduckgo with same keywords I get relevant results.

For the record, keyword I was searching for was "first man curiositystream", on Google I get a bunch of fake websites on second page of results, sited with lots of random words in description for seo hacks.

I've been using DDG for a couple of years now and never feel like using any other search engine for "better" results.

Bangs are a really cool feature. https://duckduckgo.com/bang

Not to mention instant answers. https://duck.co/help/features/instant-answers-and-other-feat...

Thanks for the reminder, just realized that iOS on Safari offers DuckDuckGo as a search engine option, and that !sp can be used to proxy Google searches via Safari.

I decided to switch to firefox and DDG this week after seeing post on Chrome's new cookies policy. The post helped me be more aware and affected my choice.

DDG works well for me in 90% of cases. Sometimes when I am searching an obscure technical issue I revert back to Google. However the biggest feature that is missing for me is custom date range searches. Google has a "1 year search" and a "custom range" search while DDG only goes up to 1 month. It would be helpful when I am searching for more current information but need a bigger range than 1 month.

I've been slowly switching over. It's now the default search engine on both my phone, laptop, and desktop. There are still certain queries where I instinctively use google because I have a feeling they will be better for what I need.

I was looking to make the switch for a while but had trouble breaking the habit. I found slowly switching each device over was the best way.

If you have not used it and are a developer, you should check it out. It integrates stackoverflow answers which I have found to be very helpful. The results have been good enough about 90% of the time. In rare cases where they are not you can add a !g to your query and it will return the google results.

I use DDG as my daily driver.

Shamefully I don't make extensive use of the features though (e.g. bangs etc), mainly because I forget them. It's a great search engine though and just gets out of the way to the point where I don't really think about it.

I love DDG! It's been my main search engine for some time now. But sometimes when I am searching for a solution for complex problems, I fall back to google by using `g!` because that, time and again, seems to take me to the answers faster.

I sense this is a general trend away from big tech and back towards the earlier days of a less centrally driven internet.

It's kind of a nice reminder of how competitive and dynamic the internet really is. I hope it can stay that way with Net Neutrality.

The chart should either have a title with "Number of Direct Queries" and Y-axis numbers such as "20M", or keep the title "Direct Queries in Millions" and have Y-axis numbers simply be "20".

I’ve heard the same complaint about the results a lot, but I’ve never understood it. I have never noticed much of a difference. Does anyone have concrete examples of search queries that Google returns more accurate results for?

I use DDG almost exclusively now. I do a lot of search and find on various tech and political topics and It has served me well.

However, I wish the search engine space evolves into a more diverse set of competing companies.

I've used Google to search for as far as I can remember, but recently switched to DuckDuckGo completely. Sorry, but the politicization of Google and the privacy issues are too much to ignore anymore.

The bangs I use most often are !az and !w

For a long time I used !img a lot, but they've incorporated native image search so I use it less.

I never used !g much, (not counting !img), but I can't remember the last time I used it.

Aww this is such great news. Didn't know how I missed it. Really nice to see privacy being relevant to more people. Been using since 2016 and the results have improved tremendously!

I too made a switch a week ago to Firefox + DDG, working well so far.

I have been using ddg for a long time and I can't be happier with it, at first I used !g a lot but now I search it all on ddg with the ocassional visit to startpage.

Google is becoming very much anti-anonymous. Its not possible to create gmail account anymore without phone number. Wish there is something like DDG for gmail.

Cool. I am rooting for them to become even more successful.

I was using DuckDuckGo for a day or two due to Google latency issues. I’m would check again in a couple days to make sure it’s permanent growth.

I'd use it daily if there wasn't such a lag after each query. Google works instantly ddg takes about 2 seconds to return results

I've been using DuckDuckGo for almost a year now and for most of the cases, it's almost as good as google

I like how the stats are numbers and just that.

No creepy segmentation or deep analysis of the privacy-invading kind like Google and Facebook.

Go DDG!

just installed it on firefox. searched for myself, not really impressed with relevancy of the results but it did surface pages that I had not seen on first two pages of google. so im guessing its not really a replacement to google but a decent alternative

It would probably explode more if they would add the ability to search within the past year.

I had no idea that DDG was Perl based. This gives me a whole new level of respect for DDG.

I like how none of the events called out on the chart had any noticeable effect.

DDG has been waiting for this moment for quite a long time.

Love it. It's on all my devices.

I prefer qwant

ironically instead of just giving me a link, now dyckduckgo results list will track me to known which link I clicked.

this is the beginning of the end for duckduckgo :(

hi google!