I agree. DDG's index is 1% the size of Google's, and after a few queries, I quickly go back to Google. I highly doubt their small index is b/c of quality reasons - they probably can't scale as much as they want, but in the end, that's 99% of the product.

The cool syntax, privacy, UX, etc makes up 1%, and can never make up for the lack of quality results (compared to Google)

In the end, it's still too early to judge them as a failure or success, they need 4-5 more years. But as it is right now, they are nowhere close to being remotely popular. The number of queries per day is a very misleading stat. That's now what's important - it's the number of unique visitors. You can have 10 people that make up a million queries, yet I doubt advertisers will be clamoring to advertise to those 10 users. Search is a product where it's pretty much 1-2 winners take all. Yahoo has 10% of the search engine market share, but has .01% of the advertising share. It's not 1:1

There has been no PR firm involved as far as I know, it is being spread by fans and advertising efforts by the founder. In my experience the results are almost always more relevant than google's, especially the 0-click info. I use DDG mostly for programming-related queries, but also normal searching. I have been using it for 99% of my searching for over a year now. There is also a rather large and devoted user base, partly due to the fact that community interaction from the team has been excellent (in my experience).

I wrote this blog post, I'm not from a PR firm or paid by a PR firm. I have been using ddg exclusively for a few days and really enjoy it.

Not everyone's use cases are the same, but for my normal everyday use it has had excellent results.

Complete linkbait piece then, b/c DDG is anything but popular.

Seriously?

There have been several posts about it, recently, right here on hacker news, John Gruber mentioned it in his podcast the Talk show, and it was also named one of Time's best 50 Websites of 2011 http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/completelist/0,29...

How is that not popular?

Been around a long time, never caught on. Their traffic #s from compete are a joke, even if they were off by a magnitude - still shows they are stale. They should try something different than competing with google.

Hey, please email me at [email protected] if you don't mind -- I'm the founder. I'm interested why you're so negative on us. Here are our real traffic #s btw: https://duckduckgo.com/traffic.html

I got a question: is there a way to increase the number of default results returned to a higher number?

We don't have a PR firm, but would appreciate the specific examples so we can improve: https://duckduckgo.com/feedback.html

here's how to improve in php: header("Location:www.google.com/#sclient=psy-ab&site=&source=hp&q=".urlencode($_REQUEST['q']));

Speaking of no one uses DDG, I don't want to be a straw man here but I believe everyone know that Google does few things very well and search is one at the very top of that list of things. I believe DDG should innovate and add few other services into the mix (like what Google added later on, Reader, Gmail etc) so DDG can potentially see if they can see itself as viable option as a service. Just relying on search as an alternate option against Google, is very limited.

Maybe they spend a lot of money for PR or this is the one thing DDG is very good at. It is impressive how diverse their PR is, from so many different sites and so many different topics.

This is just wasted in the end, they have no competitive product. In another market they could be very successful this way.

Clearly untrue. DDG has been getting steadily increasing mentions from sources which are clearly not PR shills. Some good PR may well have given them the seed, but a lot of people are trying DDG, and liking it.

In fact, I recently changed my default search engine to DDG, and I'm enjoying it. And I'm not a PR firm, working for a PR firm, or paid by a PR firm, so I guess that disproves your snide assertion that "no one uses DDG".

Yes, I decided to try switching because of the drumbeat of positive mentions on HN and elsewhere, and yes, some of that may be the result of good PR efforts. But at the end of the day, they provide a good service. Maybe you should give them a try?