I can disable it, for now. I won’t be surprised if at some point in the future, they make it the standard and only behavior.

It’s getting exponentially harder to achieve their expected growth rates. They haven’t managed to find another significant revenue source beside ads so they have to squeeze everything out of that. Kind of sad that all the super smart people there still haven’t come up with any product they can sell with enough revenue besides ads.

It's not at all strange they can't just pop out a few more of those.

Google deserves as much condemnation for introducing those as it does for the recent redesign.

I think most people don’t realize it’s Google’s fault and blame the sites.

Thank you the comment. It explains so much of how the Internet has gotten markedly worse in the last couple months.

These “auto” AdWords are totally overwhelming and awful.

Absolutely. That's how I noticed what 'Auto Ads' really did. People thought my site was infected by malware and contacted me with screenshots.

MySpace analogy doesn't make sense since there is no Facebook, which was a competent social network, here. Search is a massive investment and you don't just have random companies suddenly rising taking over the users. Duckduckgo itself uses Bing Search as its backend.

Nothing is too big to fail. If there's no direct competitor, an indirect one or a group could take over too.

> Duckduckgo itself uses Bing Search as its backend.

This reads to me as if Bing was the only backend they use, which isn't the case. According to Wikipedia they use multiple backends:

"DuckDuckGo's results are a compilation of "over 400" sources, including Yahoo! Search BOSS, Wolfram Alpha, Bing, Yandex, its own Web crawler (the DuckDuckBot) and others. It also uses data from crowdsourced sites, including Wikipedia, to populate knowledge panel boxes to the right of the results.", source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuckDuckGo#Overview

Don't be deluded by the HN bubble. I like DDG and am glad it exists, but it's usage in a year is probably what Google gets in a few minutes, and I'm willing to bet that ratio hasn't really improved significantly for years.

Google traffic is about 4 million searches per minute, which comes to 6 billion searches per day. DDG traffic is about 50 million searches per day, so about 1%.

It looks like DDG traffic has been doubling every 1.5-2 years or so for the past decade. I presume that Google's traffic is relatively constant at this point.

https://duckduckgo.com/traffic

Probably a poor assumption. The total number of internet users is still growing significantly.

Whether I've achieved any distance is an open question and I suspect that it is less than it feels like when I use DDG.

The results are comparable in my current experience. Compage searches for 'bluetooth speakers' on Google [0] and DDG [1]. In my location (Canada) DDG returns national results which are preferred and relevant.

I like that on the DDG results page the ad is clearly separated from organic results and I get the results w/out a mapping insert. That's just my preference, though.

Even the results URLs speak volumes. I have no idea what data - if any - I'm exposing about myself w/ the Google result.

[0] https://www.google.ca/search?source=hp&ei=KyUsXtPGIIGL5wKRx7...

[1] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=bluetooth+speakers&ia=shopping

I do appreciate the heads up, thanks.

Edit: just realized that DDG does currency conversion too, there's one less class of searches that goes to Google!

Unfortunately, however, having used DuckDuckGo for the last few weeks my experience has been quite the opposite (described here in some more detail: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22106837 ), especially when it comes to programming-related queries.

I hear a lot of anecdotes about search working/not working but concrete examples remain elusive.

Maybe, a browser plugin that allows you to easily report less than optimal or even irrelevant search results to DuckDuckGo (including a comparison with other search engine in case those yield more appropriate results) would be quite useful.

This obviously has privacy implications, though.

Can you provide a source for this? I couldn’t find it myself, but I was searching with DDG.

“DuckDuckGo gets its results from over four hundred sources. These include hundreds of vertical sources delivering niche Instant Answers, DuckDuckBot (our crawler) and crowd-sourced sites (like Wikipedia, stored in our answer indexes). We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we also source from a variety of partners, including Verizon Media (formerly Yahoo) and Bing.“

Why would that even matter? It's good enough no matter how it works. Frankly it's better than google since it doesn't have nearly as many anti-patterns.

It's also not "leaps and bounds ahead beyond anything else" , but they have the network effect and technical lock in to be safe enough. Two things they did: first, they promoted the usage of the omnibox as search box, so now almost every browser is auto subscribed to google,and subscriptions are sticky. Second, they stopped sending the search referrer to the target sites and worked to remove referrers completely from the web. This precludes target sites from providing a competitive search experience. Google now stands uniquely and exclusively in the pathway from the users' search bar to the destination website, and extracting the rents.

I don’t really think so, not any more.

Now, add in all the great features and functions they have built over the last 10+ years (maps, travel, etc) and they will probably always maintain an advantage. They are after all a verb...

But the actual search results, IMHO are most definitely within reach for a competitor or 3 to tackle.

I've tried all the alternatives ddg, bing etc but the Google's results are still much better imo and as long as that is true they will keep trying such shenanigans.

Nothing to do with being believable. More to do with being gimmicky and irrelevant.