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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."
I would have been up for that.
I'm sure both of your cats are very disappointed about this.
People don't trust the creepy haters at Google.
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.
I agree,and I wish DDG would publish its source code.I'd like to see what forks come out of it.
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 :-/
I'm sure this is a troll but 97% or thereabout of corporate media coverage on Trump is negative so... I'd expect any search engine to reflect that whatever that companies particular political affiliation.
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.
If you use a VPN and not the Chrome browser Google search will sometimes do a captcha check where you have to click on all the images of cars or storefronts or crosswalks. Because of this it makes DuckDuckGo the default choice for those users.
You can verify yourself by using Opera on a VPN after you clear Opera's cache and cookies
Calvin:Do you believe in the devil? Hobbes:I'm not sure man needs the help.
I usually find what I need on DuckDuckGo fairly easily. I have it as my default on several browsers, computers and my phone. I suggest just force yourself to use it for a week and see how things go. Can't hurt.
There are 10 types of people in the world: those who understand binary and those who don't.
This is a good thing.
It is neither a good thing nor a bad thing. What it does tell us is that it is not a popular thing. Increasing a tiny number by 50% is not actually very impressive compared to growing a big number by a smaller percentage. For Apple computer to grow by just 10% next year they will have to generate more business than the entire revenue of eBay over the same period. That is FAR more impressive than DDG growing 50% from close to zero.
I dunno about you, but I much prefer to use less "popular" things in life.
I don't give a shit if something is popular or not. I care if it does what I want/need and provides good value. The only reason I consider something's popularity is to evaluate whether that popularity or lack thereof will cause me problems. For example if a product is unpopular chances are that service and support for it are going to be hard to find in the future. Similarly I sometimes avoid something popular because of excessive crowds or because the popularity of it will cause my needs to be dismissed as unimportant.
I prefer the National Hockey League to the NFL, and DDG to Google, both on it's privacy model, as well as knowing that huge amounts of money drive corruption.
If you prefer the NHL to the NFL because hockey is your particular brand of vodka then that's fine, although calling the NHL unpopular is objectively kind of ridiculous. If you prefer it solely because it is less popular it means you are a hipster. You be you and use what works for you but I am not impressed by anyone who chooses something just because it is popular or explicitly because it is not.
Good enough. Generally I use DDG by default, and if that doesn't find it (last time, a few days ago, was errors for a discontinued bluetooth module) and then if google also fails I read the manual.
Red to red, black to black. Switch it on, but stand well back.
Oh, and google still seems better for image searches.
Red to red, black to black. Switch it on, but stand well back.
I'll have to try DuckDuckGo again. I used for a few weeks earlier this year, and I had to revert to Google - the quality of DuckDuckGo lagged, at the time, well behind that of Google's. I dislike Google more and more - in fact, they look like the MIcrosoft of old more and more with every passing day - but until an independent search engine reaches parity with Google's, I'll have to stick with it.
I don't think the Tech community has a Dim view of our ability to impact the world on a large scale. But our ability to affect on a small scale that affects our lives seems to be the harder push.
Trying to get work to make business decision on products not from the sales of the product, but from a good understanding of the underlining infrastructure behind it.
Trying to get your friends and family to be more secure with their systems, so they are not breaking down all the time and asking you to fix it.
Having people realize as a tech professional your Job isn't "Fixing Computers" (My apologies to those who are actually in systems repair you are a professional too)
Having people with with basic understanding trying to tell us how to do things, and get pissed off because what we do is too complex for them.
Sure if there is a big problem with Microsoft, Google, Facebook. The tech community on the whole has a power to put them in their place. But most of our chips on our shoulder is from the small things that happen daily.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Same here.. for the past two weeks, I tried DuckDuckGo on my work linux box. When looking for technical documents or more detailed info, DDG just didn't cut it, regrettably. I'm back to using google again, for now.
For personal use though, I think DDG might just work out fine.
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
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...
Far better for tech stuff and a lot of things,as DDG shows a short summary or the relevant command(from askubuntu/Stack) at the top of the page. Saves me many clicks.
Incompetent? Can you please tell me the level of Unemployment prevailing at this moment?
Trying to use the unemployment rate as an example of Trump's competency doesn't make a very good argument.
... or can we?
Just look at the 10 year graph of the unemployment rate https://tradingeconomics.com/u...
All Trump managed to do is not screw up the trend that very clearly was established under the previous president.
And it's the same for wage growth: https://tradingeconomics.com/u... although when you compare/contrast vs inflation https://tradingeconomics.com/u... real world wage growth has actually decreased the last two years vs the previous two years.
You can try arguing GDP next, but, https://tradingeconomics.com/u... https://tradingeconomics.com/u... again we're mostly still seeing the same kind of numbers/trends that began in mid/late 2010.
Now, lets have a look at something that did drastically change under Trump, Health Insurance. https://tradingeconomics.com/u...
See that big giant increase in the price index at the end of 2017 compared to the rest of the graph? That's the result of the GOP gutting parts of the ACA and Trump refusing to pay out the by law guaranteed Medicare/Medicaid subsidies.
Okay, I'm sure you want something to criticize the previous president for, so here we go: https://tradingeconomics.com/u...
Those are some pretty bad deficit numbers under Obama's first few years. The country hadn't run that big an annual deficit since WW2. On the other hand, he used that deficit to drag the country out of a pretty bad economic recession left behind by the W Bush administration and managed to decrease it back down to 2008 levels by the end of his term. Unfortunately, instead of the deficit continuing to go down under Trump, it's gone up instead thanks to a massive tax give away to the rich and corporations. https://tradingeconomics.com/u...
My bad, I guess that wasn't as much of a criticism of the last guy as the graph initially made it out to be.
Ok, here's one we can really criticize Obama for, excessively increased military spending: https://tradingeconomics.com/u...
Oops, sorry. I guess it was actually Bush who decided to start a war in Iraq in 2003 that didn't end until they hauled out Bin Laden in 2011. Oh, let's not forget the War on Terror in Afghanistan from 2001-2014 either, that at least in was in response to us being attacked first on 9/11. Except, 15 out of the 19 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia...
That claim about a search engine that filters everything through Yandex, the openly Russian intelligence service scoop, is idiotic.
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...
You found them stunningly poor? I have found them for the most part to be completely useless. 90% of the shit that gets sent back is nothing but ads. I'm doing a search for kernel RAID tweaking and I get a page full of shit where I can hire someone to do it for me, or shit that has nothing to do with the shit I'm looking for.
I found what I was looking for using duckduckgo. Damn, Linux has a nice RAID level.
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
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.