> Google Search is leaps and bounds ahead beyond anything else.

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

Whenever I hear people complain about Google and that they'll switch to a competitor, I'm reminded of the "Delete Facebook" memes that happened, only to have FB reach a new user record every subsequent month.

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.

For anyone actually curious about the numbers:

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

> I presume that Google's traffic is relatively constant at this point.

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

Their own Sources page make it sound like the actual search results are from Bing and Verizon while all the other sources (including their own crawler) are used for widgets like Instant Answers: https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/so...

I keep seeing HN users working themselves into a lather praising DDG, but I just went there and see almost identical obfuscation of ads (a tiny "Ad" in the same color as the link) and in the using of favicons for each of their organic results.

I disagree about search result quality. I switched to DDG over a year ago and only need to use !g bangs when I search either for some specific local stuff or when I search for news that have happened in the last day or two. Actually, in some cases DDG gives more relevant search results than Google, especially for programming stuff.

I concur. I only occasionally use !g w/ DDG now, whereas two years ago it was more frequent (although I can't quantify). I stuck w/ it as I wanted some distance between myself and Google.

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 really recommend editing out most of that URL, or at least shoving something an escape in there to stop it being clickable.

I missed the edit window.

I do appreciate the heads up, thanks.

+1 for having zero issues at all with using DDG as my daily driver, I only use Google for some local searches and currency conversions. DDG results have improved every year even as Google's have gotten much worse.

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

This is what I keep hearing about DuckDuckGo and I'd really like this to be true for myself and my search engine usage.

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.

It would be nice to conduct these experiments while actually saving the searches (and results) for further study & ideas from the community on how to improve them.

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

Intriguing idea. It'd be interesting to get DuckDuckGo involved in such a project because it's in their interest to improve search query matches.

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.

> Duckduckgo itself uses Bing Search as its backend.

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.“

I read the last sentence as if the actual search results all come from Bing and Verizon while they have their own crawler and 400 other sources for Instant Answers and other widgets.

Well, it does use Bing as its backend. Not solely though.

Disagree. Lately whatever changes google made to promote mainstream media articles drowns out googling historical articles. I have been using other search engines. Google is getting worse and worse. They've already lost my search business.

I hear that a lot, but search results differ for me between Bing and DDG. Bing is definitely a major component of its results, but I doubt it’s the only part.

Yeah, if you compare Bing with DDG and Ecosia you will see that the results are identical to Bing on Ecosia but differ on DDG (although obviously a major component as you say). Ecosia is a true proxy while DDG has some internal ranking mechanism.

I’ve been noticing recently that a lot of non-technical people have been complaining about how Google doesn’t work as well as it used to.

> "Duckduckgo itself uses Bing Search as its backend."

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.

google search is only as useful as the content that it points to. They used to incentivize people to make good content, now they re just stealing it, so people naturally will take their content off google or hide it behind walls.

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.

> Google Search is leaps and bounds ahead beyond anything else

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

As the web contracts, becomes more silo'd and locked behind paywalls and app gardens, the volume of searchable data is also retracting. Add in that most of Google's users never go past the first page, or the 6th result, and I think Google's search is vulnerable.

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.