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More People Than Ever Are Using DuckDuckGo; Site Says It Observed 14M Searches in One Day This Month (betanews.com)
An anonymous reader shares a BetaNews article: A lot of people are more privacy aware than they have been in the past, and are wary of entrusting everything they search for to Google. That's where privacy-focused sites like DuckDuckGo come in. Its growth since it launched 8 years ago has been nothing short of staggering, with the number of searches skyrocketing since 2013, when Edward Snowden first revealed how the US government was spying on its people. The search site says it has to date served up over 10 billion anonymous searches, with 4 billion of those occurring in the last year alone, and the company says it is growing faster than ever. On January 10 2017, the site received in excess of 14 million private searches.
Trump will get rid of all the spying. Thank you Trump.
1. Company folds due to lack of funds
2. Company sells or reorganizes to collect funds and starts divulging user data to do so.
3. Governments come in and either silently snoop or shut them down.M
Yeah, I am a cynic and have little faith in humanity. Sorry.
Silence is a state of mime.
A lot of people (myself included) will look for any other alternative to Google first. That simply became too intrusive, and people are getting very uncomfortable with it. Those same people are still on FaceBook only because that is where everyone else is. If another option becomes available, (What I would love is federated social networking somewhat like e-mail works on various servers transparently) FaceBook may see the same kind of change.
They even have image search now. The Yandex partnership must be helping.
you fail
In Cher's autotune voice: BELIEVE ! Or EJ's.
The parent believes that? And it was mod'ed up?
Here's Trump's opinion.
That's the most recent because he said nothing about it last year. And forgive me for posting from such a liberal biased source.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
> A few months ago, a prospective employer wanted me to install some software so we could chat. I could have used Skype or whatever, but he insisted.
Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
ixquick.com also does not retain search or ip information.
Startpage...
https://www.ixquick.com/
For comparison purposes, Google hasn't said exactly how many searches it handles recently, but in 2012 it said it handled 1.2 trillion searches (or averaging 3.3B/day, 137M/hour, 2.2M/minute, 38k/second). It's estimated they handle over 2T per year now (5.5B/day, 228M/day, 3.8M/hour, 63K/second). So Google likely handles in 2 days what DDG has done in 8 years.
There is no guarantee DDG doesn't spy on its users. They just tell loudly they don't.
Really? Thanks I'll give it another chance. Hope the 16th time is a charm.
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
For now, until the SEO locusts find out that people start using that engine.
So maybe we should be quiet about it. let the SEOs mess with the results.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
They want you to keep their cookies or better yet be logged in, otherwise the ui/results language is assumed from your IP, and you keep getting these stupid popups asking/telling you random crap. But DDG suffers from UI design stupidity, such as loading search results as you scroll down.
FIFY
"A lot of people are more privacy aware"
to..
"A lot of people are more aware of their privacy needs"
This half hearted nonsense about "privacy" ought to take a turn for the better, so that "privacy" get to have a meaning that reflects a personal thing AND NOT whatever bs a tech guy, or some government spout out, as if they really gave a crap about people's NEED FOR PRIVACY.
It is like the poorly understood notion of "freedom".
It doesn't really matter that "freedom" is given to you, it is what "freedom" you need.
https://www.qwant.com/
Results are quite good and seem to be a bit better than duckduckgo sometimes. Uses more fancy javascript, but has more fancy features as well and the same promise of no data collection.
If you are running Firefox, it is easy to change your default search engine to Duck Duck Go. They have made it one of the pull down search menu options.
I've been using it to search for months now, and I don't notice much difference. Highly recommend.
Sometimes Etch-A-Sketch is better, Photoshop has a multi GiB installation size, a growing hodgepodge of not very unified tools because they grew there and can't change cos user-base, requires a subscription service and insists on "managing" your media library and by extension you life... You yearn for the power and simplicity of Photoshop v1.0, but it's no longer available, enough is enough - you say fuck Photoshop and you settle for an Etch-A-Sketch, spend more time actually drawing things rather than being distracted by shit.
Of course sometimes you're still forced to use Photoshop because the Etch-A-Sketch doesn't have a fricking magic wand, although the overhead of going back and forth between AFF (Aluminium Fillings Format) and PSD is such a pain that sometimes you just grind through it manually with those primitive x y dials. I've considered at least patching multiaxis input device support (AKA a mouse) to make this easier... too far? what are we talking about?
and even if/when more/different results are required then Bang G from FF's top right Search Box. Bangs rock! Errmmmm ya do all use DDG with FF right?
May the lies we live by make us strong, healthy, happy and wise - Kurt Vonnegut.
Did he send you "JobDescription.exe" ?
It depends how you search. I know how to search. Google used to let me search well. Then they changed that.
"Yeah, I know you put all 5 of those words on there, but how about just two of them, and a vague 3rd-level synonym for a third?"
or "Hey, I know you put that error message in quotes. But I didn't get any ad results related to that, so I just decided to remove 3/4 of the words and replace them with 'lose weight now'
If you need that, sure, use google. If you actually know what you're searching for, use ddg.
1) How can we KNOW that DuckDuckGo really doesn't track/collect/sell our data? Many other supposedly responsible companies have made the same claim but it pretty much always turns out to be a lie.
2) Assuming they're not tracking us, How do DuckDuckGo make money or at least pay to keep their service running? They don't even show ads.
When I forget the latest domain TBP had to switch to I use DDG and it finds it. Can't say the same for Goo.. *CENSORSHIP* search engine.
I have never had the kind of experience you describe with Google. Not once.
I've never had a positive search experience with DDG.
Not once.
"Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my Presidency. I'm fucked."; ~ Donald J. Trump
I have a few problems with ddg search, but I have the same problem with Google search so I feel no great need to switch away (just to bitch at whoever is within typing distance when an annoyance pops up.)
Last time I tried DDG, all the results were spam. What's the point? If I can find what I need on a biased search engine, but I can't on an unbiased one, guess what I'm going to use.
I decided to give DDG a try full-time as my default in the browser a while back (year or two?). DDG wasn't getting it done, however, so I would just end up back on Google. It was easy to justify since my office still uses Google docs/spreadsheets and is deeply intertwined with their products and I can't 100% escape their "Big Google" ecosystem. Besides, their results were usually superior when it came to getting me the exact results I wanted (vs. just being close) QUICKLY - so I took advantage of the saved time I'd already paid for with my privacy already.
I'm finding that more recently, however, that DDG is "good enough" in most cases. I still go back and forth because I'm too impatient, but DDG always gets the first shot - and I don't go back very often.
So, if you tried DDG in the past and found their results wanting, you should give it another try.
I dunno, DDG ignores some of my search terms too, so I can't say it's much better in that respect.
Since I am concerned that duckduckgo might leak search information, I prefer duckduckduckgo, which uses duckduckgo internally, but hides my searches even better. Should we ever find that duckduckduckgo is also storing personal information, we could always create duckduckduckduckgo, which would solve the problem once and for all.
I can't bring myself to use a search engine with such a dumb name.
It's a decentralised, peer-to-peer search-engine-concept.
As soon as enough people start using it, it'll easily overtake googles capacity of crawlers quite easily!
http://yacy.de/en/
I dont think you belong here, sad but true.
I agree, it's a lot better than it used to be and it's now my primary search engine. If I'd had to characterise it compared to Google, I'd say that it has less results, but of better quality. For a lot of things I commonly search for, it returns much more useful results. However, when I'm looking for something niche, like the first use of a Ancient Greek phrase, Google is still better and DDG sometimes returns nothing at all.
Your definition of useless is rather broad dont you think? Its quite useful for 14 Million people a day.
I love DDG, but lately there's so many bad results... Fake blogs and Wordpress sites, containing pdfs that contain only a single shortened link that leads to attempted malware install.
When Obama was campaigning in '07 he said he would end the spying on U.S. citizens. And have the most transparent government ever. And close Gitmo.
Two things there:
(1) Congress prevented him.
(2) Candidate Obama, once elected, adapted to fit the political reality. Candidate Trump seems so far to keep wanting to distort reality to conform to his fragile ego.
About 6 months prior to Obama's first term election, he completely flip-flopped on telecom immunity.
As a result, Obama received greater telecom campaign donations, which helped him spend more money on his campaign.
That's an example of a politician "adapting to fit political reality", and the political climate was so corrupt that your candidate felt comfortable betraying a promise several months before the election!
Framing "betraying campaign promises" as "adapting to fit the political reality" makes it seem almost... noble.
"I have never had the kind of experience you describe with Google. Not once."
Then what search site do you use? Because from my experience, it appears that you don't use Google at all - that would be the only way to avoid the described behavior.
I can't comment on DDG, never used it, no clue.
Using it as primary search for years, do tens of searches a day and have rarely any problem. I still use !i for google image search which i find useful, but other than that I am 100% DDG user for years.
Only problem i ever had is that it constantly prompts you to install the search bar for ddg. But i blame this on not accepting permanent cookies or noscript usage or some combination of the two. Google is even worse at trying to get you using chrome and the toolbars and all that, its beyond intrusive with them...
If they get better image search, i would never have to use google.
As a potential lottery winner, I totally support tax cuts for the wealthy
Today I learned that 14 million people is "nobody", and that "not the most popular" equals "useless".
http://securityspread.com/2016...
I had to switch to a different search engine as I really do not have time for their CAPTCHA for each search. Moreover sometimes they even require multiple CAPTCHAs for one search. Google search was the best one but it is really not worth so much time of mine.
As the other respondent has mentioned, d*ckd*ckd*ckgo is a possible malware site. Be careful.
Not sure about the privacy angle, but Ecosia plants trees for every search, and otherwise uses Google's engine. Also, I've noticed the results are not personalized, which I for one prefer.
Its not really the spying stuff as much as I like searching for a subject and then getting objective information back rather than have Google show me what it thinks I want to see mingled in with a bunch of ads. What good is intelligence gathering if it can't be applied to the masses? But on that note, Duckduckgo also has a .onion version.
TheOuterLinux.com
A search on google for "Google no longer respects quotes" shows that in April 2012 (first result) google stopped obeying quotes. So it's been longer than I thought.
Basically, you're probably searching for things like "Buy new tv" or "What good show now tv", and I'm looking more for obscure error messages, quotes, etc. Like I said, google is okay for some things, just not when you know exactly what you want, and don't want your result to be tailored toward a profile built from your browsing and other searching habits.
use Startpage.com instead. Stricter privacy, since it's EU based and doesn't have to comply with U.S. agencies requests for information, whatever they might have.
Would not be surprised to see people move away from youtube, facebook, and twitter, as well.
The only problem is, Firefox changes the default back to Yahoo at the drop of the hat. Really pisses me off...
I don't understand how people are so unwilling to hand everything over to big ol' American Google, but when it comes to the big ol' Russian Google-clone Yandex there are no qualms what so ever. You dumbasses don't think they do the exact same thing, only with less oversight and antitrust litigation?
After 8 years they have 14m searches. Thats from what, 200k users? Out of 7 bil. ...
Staggering
while over on DDG, a search for "Google no longer respects quotes" shows only one single result...
and you're reading it right now.
Duck Duck Go is a US government-backed honeypot. You know it, even if you don't want to admit it to yourself.
it ain't shit compared to Google when it comes to finding what I'm searching for. It's more than a little annoying having to dig 60 results deep when you're used to seeing what you want in the first 3.
I've settled on Startpage, which scrapes Google. That way I can actually find what I'm searching for and have a layer (of unknown effectiveness) between me and them.
Would this be the same DuckGoGo that installs itself unasked, unwanted, and unwelcome, that hides itself so it's near-impossible to remove, and redirects searches from real search engines to it's not-ready-for-prime-time program...? In which case, thanks but I'll pass.