Duck.com keeps growing. You should use it.
In 2014 I linked to a post that showed DuckDuckGo‘s daily search volume at roughly 5 million searches per day. In 2015 they had grown to 12 million per day.
I hadn’t checked in to their stats in a long time until I saw this tweet from them. They are now averaging 67 million searches per day.
Their steady growth is impressive but I think this number should be much, much higher. If you haven’t already done so please consider switching away from Google for the vast majority of your searches on desktop, mobile, and tablet. It is very easy to do.
Why switch away from Google search? Having any one company own search is bad for a variety of reasons. And they are obviously abusing that power. Having Duck.com eat into that market share even a little will help force Google to be more honest, hopefully. Also, when you use Google they are using that information in ways that are helpful and ways that are creepy. I understand the benefits of making search results that are tailored to you – but the drawbacks outweigh the benefits.
Use Duck.com for as many searches as you can. Use Google only when Duck.com can’t find what you’re looking for. For me, that is about 1 or 2 searches per month at this point.
No, this isn’t an ad.
@cdevroe 75% of the time I need to go use a second search site to find what I was looking for anyway so I had to stop bothering with Duck.
@cdevroe It grew into an amazing service. When I can’t find what I’m looking for I use the Startpage bang and get Google results without the tracking. The bang feature is one of my personal favorites on DDG.
@maique !g
@bix 75% is a lot. What are you searching for? (Nevermind, I’m not Google, I don’t want to know, that’s the point of Duck.com)
@cdevroe !s 😊
@maique !wa
@maique by the way, I’ve submitted !cdevroe to DDG. We will see if they accept it.
@cdevroe Yes! Another one I use too!
@cdevroe Nice! Fingers crossed!
@cdevroe I switched earlier this year and haven’t had any issues with results. (Maybe my searches are too pedestrian to fit into all the people who seem to be having issues.)
@maique @cdevroe I thought the private Google searching feature had been scrapped by Google so even if you use !g it still tracks you.
@cdevroe I’ve been using DDG for years now and have the whole family on it. No issues though the kids’ teachers sometimes are confused when they say to use the “first Google hit” since DDG will return something else as first.
@vishae I wasn’t aware they had one to begin with, that’s why I usually go for !s when the need arises.
@vishae @maique 😳
@ronguest Excellent
@maique what’s the diff between startpage and DDG? Is !s better?
@vishae Different search engines. DDG gets the results from a number of sources (including Bing and Yahoo) and StartPage is, according to them, Google without the trackers.