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Pro-Privacy Search Engine DuckDuckGo Hits 30 Million Daily Searches, Up 50% In a Year (techcrunch.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Some nice momentum for privacy-focused search engine DuckDuckGo which has just announced it's hit 30 million daily searches a year after reaching 20 million -- a year-on-year increase of 50%. Hitting the first 10 million daily searches took the search engine a full seven years, and then it was another two to get to 20 million. So as growth curves go it must have required patience and a little faith in the run up. It also recently emerged that DDG had quietly picked up $10 million in VC funding, which is only its second tranche of external investment. The company told us this financing would be used to respond to an expanding opportunity for pro-privacy business models, including by tuning its search engine for more local markets and expanding its marketing channels to "have more of a global focus."
Some nice momentum for privacy-focused search engine DuckDuckGo which has just announced it's hit 30 million daily searches a year after reaching 20 million -- a year-on-year increase of 50%.
To provide perspective Google does 1.2 trillion searches per day. Good progress but pretty much a rounding error compared to the big boys.
The company told us this financing would be used to respond to an expanding opportunity for pro-privacy business models, including by tuning its search engine for more local markets and expanding its marketing channels to "have more of a global focus."
Having trouble parsing this sentence. It's so vague as to be effectively meaningless.
I've seen what DuckDuckGo's business model is supposed to be and I'm rather dubious how much it can scale because advertisers and retailers don't generally give a shit about your privacy and in fact your privacy is somewhat at odds with their incentives. Furthermore Google and Bing and the others get all the network effects so advertisers and retailers aren't generally going to flock to a small search engine that isn't going to give them as much data or reach as many potential customers. If DuckDuckGo is really doing what they say they are trying to do I wish them well but it's not going to be an easy battle.
Lately I've found Google results to be stunningly poor. It seems that in addition to indexing a page's straight content (the body text of an article) it also indexes anything that may be on the sidebar like a news feed. You end up with top results that don't even contain the word you are searching for.
It would be really nice to see an extremely advanced search where you could feed it a list of sites to search or exclude a list of sites from the results. Or maybe even flat out have a check box or something to exclude results from X from now on. Almost like Safe Search.
it also feels to me that Google became worse, often when I look for open source stuff, build errors, errors, patches (for #t2sde https://t2sde.org/ I do not find much anymore, a decade ago I usually found hits on mailing lists, bug trackers, etc. Maybe Google focused more on gossip and social drama, then actual hard facts :-/
As a former Google engineer, I am so happy to hear this. I am currently phasing Google out of every part of my life. The last thing I have, that I don't know if I can ever really get rid of, is my Gmail. That said, most of my personal emails have cut over to another already, and I do everything I can to keep my access to it isolated to avoid giving Google any freebies when it comes to tracking. I am not anti-ad (though I am anti invasive/malicious ad), as ads thanklessly power the free internet that everyone expects that they should be handed for free, but the threat Google and the other massive multinationals pose in terms of censorship, spying, and information control is unforgivable. They should all be regulated as publishers and utilities.
To put it simply? Google became normized, dropped functions and search options that made it popular and then started 'curating results' that it believes you should see instead of of what you're searching for. You made a point about how bad it's gotten for OS/FOSS type stuff, but it's almost impossible to find information with google for generic troubleshooting of windows codes these days. The bit about google being focused on gossip and social drama? Well probably more truth to that then we think, google wanted to be the "search page" of the internet, the first thing everyone went to for everything from email to news. They got there, and...it all went to shit.
There's an upside with this though, it's fostering competitive behavior and people are looking for other options. Now the question will be, will google try to go full walled garden when people move to other sites or try to bring people back.
Om, nomnomnom...
I would have been up for that.
Oddly enough, that's what I use DuckDuckGo for mostly. If you're looking for a torrent it's easier to find using DDG due to the number of DMCA takedowns Google has to comply with (and I dont blame Google for that either).
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
In short, I don't think Google can put up a walled garden, no matter what they try. They're a browser based service, and as such will always be subject to the disconnected nature of browsers.
Newspapers also didn't believe that if they went walled garden it wouldn't backfire in a spectacular fashion either, but it did. The thing is, google might try to do it if it looks like there are massive drop-offs in continuous users, but enough of a user base to remain profitable. In the worst case scenario? They try to leverage their ad service so it only works with one or two browsers, in turn sites starved for money try to force users to use a particular browser. The usual useragent tricks no longer work as the browser requires authing off a unique hash.
There's plenty of ways they could do it, of course they'd also set themselves up for some ripe trustbusting.
Om, nomnomnom...
Newspapers also didn't believe that if they went walled garden it wouldn't backfire in a spectacular fashion either, but it did. The thing is, google might try to do it if it looks like there are massive drop-offs in continuous users, but enough of a user base to remain profitable. In the worst case scenario? They try to leverage their ad service so it only works with one or two browsers, in turn sites starved for money try to force users to use a particular browser. The usual useragent tricks no longer work as the browser requires authing off a unique hash.
There's plenty of ways they could do it, of course they'd also set themselves up for some ripe trustbusting.
First on Google - while I admit there are technical methods to make it happen, they can't because any of those proposals would cut their audience in major ways. And they don't have the pull for the most desirable US target audience - iPhone users. So if you can't get iPhone users, you've already failed. Google needs their iPhone target audience more than Apple needs Google.
Newspapers screwed up a long long long time ago. They made some serious miscalculations, in ways that were painful to watch even as they made them. The things they should have done, but didn't:
Instead, they charged a full plus subscription fee for their content, meaning almost no one went to their websites. Then they offered it up for free. Then they tried to go to a subscription model again. It's almost as many mistakes as Sears made. I mean, explain to me how America's mail-order catalogue super store didn't automatically become America's web store? Instead we got Amazon. Whomever was running Sears in the 90s should be saddled with the full failure of Sears. That was some spectacular lack of vision there.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.