Rant seems extremely strong - how about we go with well thought through set of opinions that the CEO of Duck Duck Go is rigorously applying to his product.

I personally found his argument so persuasive I intend to set everything to DuckDuckGo again now.

I made the switch to DDG about 12 months ago for all devices. It has been an entirely positive experience.

Went to try it for a week to see if it was viable. Haven't looked back and have never needed to go to Google's search engine for a year now. Best feature is by far the Stack Overflow 'instant answers'!

I have it as my primary search engine now too, but I find myself constantly using !g because the results suck.

Same. I use Firefox for Android which is helpful if you have searches you know for a fact DDG won't be able to figure because Firefox let's you select a different search engine instead from the bottom. I do this for sports and location specific searches.

When I moved to DDG, it took me more than a week to tune my searches for it. I was completely trained to the google interpreter and ddg works different. Now I use slightly different phrases, or ordering and it is great. I only use !g for very specific technical searches, like obscure errors.

Do you have some hints on effectively using DDG, based on that experience?

Just use it. There are no special tricks or hints needed, it is that good.

Biggest differences to me is that Google seems to handle natural questions like "how do i..." in a "smart" way whereas ddg seems to be more altavista like in that your keywords have higher weight rather than trying to outsmart you. Another difference is that Google is much better on local search thanks to its strong bonds with Google maps, like checking opening hours. For anything not maps related DDG has been my default for can't even remember how many years, over 5.

I would also find this interesting, I switched from DDG to StartPage.com (proxied Google results) for this reason.

If you want to directly search other sites without having to choose a different engine in Firefox: if you search through DDG, you can put !g before or after your query and it’ll forward you to google.

There are a bunch of these. !a forwards to Amazon, !w to Wikipedia, etc.

> I have it as my primary search engine now too, but I find myself constantly using !g because the results suck.

It's the opposite for me. I use primarily google, but when the results suck (which is quite often), I switch to duckduckgo to obtain a sensible search.

It’s usually good enough for me 90-95% and if I need something that google does better I’ll just use !sp as a proxy to those results. !g is a last resort.

Try !s instead of !g for startpage. Same results, less tracking.

Similar results. Sometimes the Google bubble helps.

But I agree. I check on DuckDuckGo, if I can't find what I'm looking for, most of the time, adding !s finds it. If not, I go back and switching to !g.

When a DDG search has results that seem unsatisfactory then just do a follow up Google bang with !g

Often with technical searches the DDG results seem better.

The "just" in having to analyze some results and come to the conclusion that I need to rerun the query with some prefix is not so convincing. I've already wasted time at that point.

You still have to analyze results anyway. Or do you only take the first result that Google provides?

As to rerun the query, that's what the back button is for. Simply hit back, add your bang and enter. Most browsers keep that page in cache so going back is pretty quick.

That probably helps them improve. If I were at DDG I would look at these queries and try to improve the results to match Google.

Been full DDG almost as long and now I can't go back. It gives me much better results than google does.

Quora is not a forum for product placement. The CEO ad was not answering the question.

Quora is a good place for product placement and is commonly used as such. In fact, I believe that’s Quora’s revenue generation model...

Hang on, do you think Quora is being paid to allow such answers, or that they allow them because controversial answers are popular ?

Whether or not companies are paying Quora, it's common for startup founders to answer questions there.

Sometimes the posts are blatant ads that don't really answer the question, or they add nothing that was not already answered. But sometimes they do answer the question and provide value, while also subtly pointing to a product. I think the latter is acceptable, and I do it occasionally myself. (Example: https://www.quora.com/What-kinds-of-lights-are-best-to-comba...)

Consider this: founders have the strongest conviction for solving a given problem. They often created a product because they saw a gap in the market, and they tend to be domain experts. So, they are highly qualified to answer questions within their area of expertise.

If a post provides value and just so happens to offer a relevant solution with financial strings attached, I have absolutely no problem with it. I might even end up purchasing it, because by searching or asking questions on Quora, I am looking for a solution myself.

Agreed.

I've assumed one can pay to pin answers to the top, but according to https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-business-model-of-Quora-Ho... that is falsified.

The amount of misinformation I see on Quora is staggering; product placement like this is better than the average content, to be honest.

It wasn't always this way. Quora's user base expanded heavily and the quality of content suffered. When the community was smaller questions and answers were more informative. Its slowly becoming a glorified Yahoo answers.

I've been using it for years (how many years I can't quite recall, but at least 4 or 5). Haven't looked back. If I really need Google results, I can always stick "!g " in front of the search.

You can stick !g or any of those at almost every place in the query. In fact, if it is at the end you can omit the space.

Yep. I always forget that, though, so I stick to the beginning as a force of habit.

I made the switch on all my devices about 6 weeks ago. I lasted 5 weeks. At least for quickly finding relevant programming documentation, I didn't think the results were on par with Google.

You can use the g! prefix and it will go to Google. I found DDG plenty good enough for my use case, and in the rare case I can't find it there I just use g! and bam.

I thought “g!” as opposed to “!g” was a typo, but TIL both ways work equally fine! Thanks!

Bang commands are such a wonderful feature on DDG. Not just for searching other engines when the DDG results aren't what I'm looking for but also for ecommerce sites. The frontpage of most sites are extremely heavyweight and you have to go through a ton of garbage just to get to a search box. Being able to add !homedepot to a DDG search and have it send me to the search results page at Home Depot and not the DDG spidering of the site is pretty nifty feature. I do most of my searches of shopping sites that way now.

I often use the other ones to go directly to the search I want: !imdb, !w (wikipedia), !rt (rotten tomatoes), etc.

If you still want to support DuckDuckGo, you might want to use a browser that lets you prefix search quesies with a one or two letter combo for the search engine to use. Chrome and Vivaldi have this feature and I think Firefox does as well, although I exclusively use its search bar instead, so I am not completely sure.

Yeah, I'm convinced now, too

I can’t get over ther branding. I know this is a terrible reason for not switching but I can’t stand their name or logo. If they were named something more modern and less annoying I’d consider. Call me shallow but branding is important if I’m going to use it every day.

It’s a duck with a bow tie. It’s adorable. Are you not human?

It looks like Disney's original version of Donald Duck. Knowing how Disney influenced copyright law doesn't help in liking the character.

I guess I am not. Something about a duck in a bow tie doesn’t sit well with me.

I short while ago, I was surprised to find my tech-illiterate family members and friends using DuckDuckGo without me having the privacy talk with them (many of them cited that they feel Google has finally crossed the line).

The thing is that people (including those who don't use DDG) remember "the goofy-looking duck". DuckDuckGo would be extremely foolish to throw away the mind share they built so far.

Besides, for whatever it's worth, I happen to like the name and logo. I think it's very memorable and has character unlike generic startup name #13.

How about something more like CompuGlobalHyperMegaNet?

Better.

While I use DDG as my default search engine I also never got the name.. I think the logo is fine but the name is beyond me.

...what? Did you never play duck-duck-go(/ose) as a child?

As a kid I played duck-duck-goose. I don't think I originally made the connection to that either when I saw the slightly shorter name duck-duck-go.

Funny. In Germany this game has a very different name (something like 'The fox goes round'). It didn't even occur to me that it could be that.

edit: And I still do not understand the relation to a search engine :)

To be fair, "Google" is pretty silly sounding too, in a vacuum. . .But yes, DDG isn't a great name, and it put me off using it in college.

Branding is easily the hardest part of a new project. Code is easy. Names are hard!

it isn't the reason I don't DDG (or is it?) ..but I had a similar reaction to the branding.

> The rest of the post is a rant about user tracking.

Almost. There's also:

> "The only other way we’ve found so far, which currently accounts for a much smaller portion of our revenue, is non-tracking affiliate partnerships with Amazon and eBay.

> "When you visit those sites through DuckDuckGo, including when using !bangs, and subsequently make a purchase, we receive a small commission. This mechanism operates anonymously and there is no personally identifiable information exchanged between us and Amazon or eBay.

that is a clever strategy -- there's a reason so many blogspam websites use it.

Has he never heard of retargeting? That model is essentially bidding on people. And I wouldnt be surprised if retargeting will become the most popular form or advertising targeting.

He makes the distinction later on in the article. "Google is not a search company, they're an advertising company." Google has their display network all across the internet, DDG does not.

Retargeting is a popular model for advertising companies, where the retargeting follows you around the internet. Retargeting is much less valuable if you are just a search company.

I think there's a problem with this model however. When the highest bidder wins, consumers and advertisers can lose, big.

I understand how DDG has to say this is the best and smartest way to do things because they have to live with their promise of not creeping on their visitors - so they can't use the same analytics that someone like Google has. It's just marketing.

But the ads that go to the top should be the most valuable, not necessarily go to the buyer with the deepest pockets.

I suppose you could say "car" ads cost $x per click, and then let all advertisers rotate, but that's not helpful either. You could measure which one gets clicked the most and have it move to the top, but that can be gamed. If you had any way of knowing how long someone spends on the advertised websites, or base it off of social media reviews or allow consumers with verified accounts to rate ads, that might work better.

I don't know, I just can't trust an ad format where I know the top click just spends the most money.

That's not how this model works. There are three general models of online advertising:

- CPM: you pay per impression (ie how often the ad is seen)

- CPC: cost per click. You only pay when the user clicks.

- CPA: you only pay when the user clicks and does something (eg buys something)

Display advertising (putting ads on third-party websites eg AdSense) is primarily CPM. Search advertising is primarily CPC (or at least this is how Google operates; I assume DDG is similar).

It's important to understand the implications of this.

In a CPC model the system that selects what ads to show you is doing so to maximize revenue. Since they only make revenue when you click a lot of effort is spent in determining the predicted CTR (click through rate) because:

Revenue = # of impressions x pCTR

So it's not just a question of who pays the most for an ad (that's how display advertising works largely) because a $1 CPC with 1% CTR earns more revenue than a $10 CPC with 0.01% CTR.

This is why I have less problem with the CPC search advertising model than pretty much any other model because your interests and the interests of the search engine are largely aligned. You want the results that are most relevant to you and that might be an organic search result or an ad. As long as the ads are clearly display as such, it's fine.

Also with search there is intent. You've searched for something so there's something you want. Who's to say an ad won't be the most relevant result?

You missed out the other model of cost per slot, e.g. Daring Fireball’s ad, various podcasts, etc. While you’re paying for visibility it’s not a direct CPM as there’s a fixed cost for the time.

Lots of big podcasts are going CPM and inserting ads into each download.

It seems that what you are describing though would tend over time to result in a search engine that is principally geared towards returning commercial results rather than amateur/hobbyist results since the interests of search/potential advertisers are always going to be in closer alignment then hobbyists who will almost never be running an ad campaign.

This has been my main criticism of Google's direction the last 15 years or so. Seems like search results use to populate handsomely with personal sites and blogs run by hobbyists uninterested in extracting a dollar from the visitor. If the search results could return either (a) a link to a book sold on Amazon or (b) some Phd's site discussing the topic it seems likely that (a) wins and (b) gets buried somewhere on page 2.

CPM should be updated to CPK.

The M in CPM is the Roman numeral for 1000. It's an archaic term, and should be replaced with the SI unit for 1000. Though coining the phrase "kilo-impression" would be a stretch.

Technically the M in CPM is "Mille", the French word for thousand. The origin of the term is from traditional print publishing.

100 per cent correct.

I read it as "cost per Mpression".

I did too, during Marketing 101 in college. And this illustrates the need to update the term.

> I don't know, I just can't trust an ad format where I know the top click just spends the most money.

Why? That's exactly how it works every where else: Radio, TV, Billboards. If two people want the same spot, the person who ponies up more money gets the spot.

And that’s how Bing served malware

And that's how your local newspaper serves you telephone numbers to ambulance chasers and medicare fraudsters.

You already trust your search engine to rank results based on your search terms. They can do the same thing for their ads without having to do additional tracking. These features can pretty easily be added to the auction if you consider bad ads as a cost to your company.

You end up showing the ad that maximizes something like bid * click_rate + quality_score * quality_value. quality_value can be tweaked to change the balance between short-term revenue and ad quality.

>But the ads that go to the top should be the most valuable, not necessarily go to the buyer with the deepest pockets.

It is my understanding that similar to Google, the first couple of links might be ads, but the rest are organic.

I just did a search for a movie I like - To the right is an infobox with a blurb from Wikipedia + links to rotten tomatoes and IMDB. Under it is an amazon ad to buy a copy.

The top 5 links are IMDB, Rotten Tomatoes, a definition of the word, and a trailer.

Seems pretty unobtrusive and on point to me. If I wanted to buy a blu-ray of the movie I'd probably click that ad.

> But the ads that go to the top should be the most valuable...

Why? I'm not using DDG for the advertisements. I'm using them for search.

> I just can't trust an ad format where I know the top click just spends the most money.

This seems orthogonal to whether the actual target is a keyword or user-tracked data. If two firms want to target the same demographic (e.g., Ford and Chevy want to target 20-something Dodge Ram owners who search for 'truck'), something has to decide which advertisements to display on top.

What if they actually disclosed the CPC or CPA value?

I know a lot of the big-money keywords used to be things like lead-gen arbitrage in the legal and financial sector. If someone is searching for "life insurance quotes" and they see that the top advertiser is some comparison-shopping site paying $50 per click, will they still think of them as an unbiased referral service, or someone who has to bury that $50 cost somewhere?

Are you implying that there’s an ad format that you can trust?

> But the ads that go to the top should be the most valuable, not necessarily go to the buyer with the deepest pockets.

That's the point of a search engine. If you show those as ads, you'd just be duplicating the top search results every time.