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Comment by hardtke | Hacker News Reader

This increase in traffic are not being seen in the unique visitor counts measured by Compete (https://siteanalytics.compete.com/duckduckgo.com/). It appears as if a loyal core of duckduckgo users are switching to it entirely. Alternatively, duckduckgo users are not tracked by Compete, which is entire possible since I believe Compete gets their data from browser extensions that don't respect privacy. Note, Compete data is old, and wouldn't reflect this surge.

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Judging by my own experience and some of my colleagues, this seems to be the case.

I switched to DDG about a week before the whole NSA thing. At first it was awkward, queries are slower than google (sometimes the results are worse), but after a while I stopped noticing it.

I don't mind waiting a second more if it means not being tracked, and most of the time my queries are simple and the results are on par with other search engines.

*edit changed <<worst>> to <<worse>> the results aren't that bad...

I soft-switched a month or two ago and in the beginning was adding !g to pretty much every query out of habit. Over the last week however I decided to poke around more (checking out the other ! tags, understanding what sorts of special queries would get answers) and have only asked for Google results once since to compare with DDG. Google's presentation is still much better (i.e. if I type in Yankees on Google I get a fully styled box score and schedule... with DDG I get some Wikipedia suggestions and a small blurb from MLB/ESPN news underneath.) but for web results I haven't been too disappointed. It's far less frustrating than I remember it being for regular use, so it wouldn't surprise me at all if recent events have prompted more casual users to commit to it.

Edit: For a good example of its biases, search "hacker news" on ddg, bing, then google.

Interesting. DuckDuckGo shows news.ycombinator.com as the featured site, while Google does not show this exact link at all on the first site, neither via g! nor s!. Only the HN jobs site is in the top ten search results. Bing has it correctly again.

That graph only goes to May. The increase happened two months later. For the date range it shows, their estimates match up with the usage graph on DDG almost perfectly.

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