<story><title>DuckDuckGo grew more than 70% this year</title><url>http://qz.com/574853/duckduckgo-the-search-engine-that-doesnt-track-its-users-grew-more-than-70-this-year/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>sundarurfriend</author><text>FWIW, DDG search in my experience has gotten vastly better in the past year or so. It &lt;i&gt;used&lt;/i&gt; to be that 90% of my searches ended up repeated with !g to go to google, but nowadys I&amp;#x27;d guess that&amp;#x27;s like 30%, and even among those, half the time google&amp;#x27;s answer quality ends up the same.&lt;p&gt;The only cases where Google is predictably and consistenly superior are 1. error&amp;#x2F;diagnostic messages: DDG still sucks at precision search, and quotes are not always the answer; 2. queries that require Natural Language Processing: Google understands stuff like &amp;quot;the bad moustache guy from XYZ series&amp;quot; where I myself have only a vague idea of what I&amp;#x27;m looking for.&lt;p&gt;And oftentimes the Instant Answers end up offsetting somewhat poorer quality of results, so kudos to DDG for coming up with those.&lt;p&gt;(None of this is meant to disqualify your experience though, just expressing my own joy at their results having improved for my use case.)</text></item><item><author>newscracker</author><text>&amp;gt; “Our biggest challenge is that most people have not heard of us,” Weinberg says. “We very much want to break out into the mainstream.”&lt;p&gt;It won&amp;#x27;t help at all if more people get to know of DDG and then leave it after a single trial because the results are not great.&lt;p&gt;I value privacy a lot and want something like DDG to succeed and become really big, but I get frustrated very often with DDG. I know many people are very happy with the results from DDG. For &lt;i&gt;most of my searches&lt;/i&gt; though (on technical and other matters), I end up doing a second search on Start Page or Google because DDG still does not have search by date and the search results are nowhere close to Google.&lt;p&gt;I do have and use DDG as my default search engine in the hope that DDG keeps analyzing the volume of !s or !g queries as an indicator of how much DDG is lacking and takes action to improve it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pixard</author><text>I last tried DDG a few years ago and couldn&amp;#x27;t get anything done at all as the results were simply not what I needed (PHP &amp;#x2F; Laravel &amp;#x2F; WordPress development).&lt;p&gt;Your comment made me try it again today and after several hours of using it I can definitely say it has vastly improved in results for my particular use case.&lt;p&gt;While a few hours are obviously not a huge metric it&amp;#x27;s still satisfying enough so I have switched it to default for now and we&amp;#x27;ll see how it goes.&lt;p&gt;Thanks for sharing your experience.</text></comment>
<story><title>DuckDuckGo grew more than 70% this year</title><url>http://qz.com/574853/duckduckgo-the-search-engine-that-doesnt-track-its-users-grew-more-than-70-this-year/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>sundarurfriend</author><text>FWIW, DDG search in my experience has gotten vastly better in the past year or so. It &lt;i&gt;used&lt;/i&gt; to be that 90% of my searches ended up repeated with !g to go to google, but nowadys I&amp;#x27;d guess that&amp;#x27;s like 30%, and even among those, half the time google&amp;#x27;s answer quality ends up the same.&lt;p&gt;The only cases where Google is predictably and consistenly superior are 1. error&amp;#x2F;diagnostic messages: DDG still sucks at precision search, and quotes are not always the answer; 2. queries that require Natural Language Processing: Google understands stuff like &amp;quot;the bad moustache guy from XYZ series&amp;quot; where I myself have only a vague idea of what I&amp;#x27;m looking for.&lt;p&gt;And oftentimes the Instant Answers end up offsetting somewhat poorer quality of results, so kudos to DDG for coming up with those.&lt;p&gt;(None of this is meant to disqualify your experience though, just expressing my own joy at their results having improved for my use case.)</text></item><item><author>newscracker</author><text>&amp;gt; “Our biggest challenge is that most people have not heard of us,” Weinberg says. “We very much want to break out into the mainstream.”&lt;p&gt;It won&amp;#x27;t help at all if more people get to know of DDG and then leave it after a single trial because the results are not great.&lt;p&gt;I value privacy a lot and want something like DDG to succeed and become really big, but I get frustrated very often with DDG. I know many people are very happy with the results from DDG. For &lt;i&gt;most of my searches&lt;/i&gt; though (on technical and other matters), I end up doing a second search on Start Page or Google because DDG still does not have search by date and the search results are nowhere close to Google.&lt;p&gt;I do have and use DDG as my default search engine in the hope that DDG keeps analyzing the volume of !s or !g queries as an indicator of how much DDG is lacking and takes action to improve it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>temp</author><text>&amp;gt;FWIW, DDG search in my experience has gotten vastly better in the past year or so.&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, I can&amp;#x27;t say the same.&lt;p&gt;As someone from a smaller and non-English-speaking country, I doubt there&amp;#x27;ll ever be an effort to improve their results for my language and considering that even Bing does an absolutely terrible job at it, Google is my only choice for when doing local searches.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s like all search engines apart from Google are stuck 20 years in the past with how bad they are.</text></comment>