DuckDuckGo Excitement: Real or Semi Real?
February 19, 2012
I like DuckDuckGo. I like Blekko. I like Yandex. I don’t get too excited about Bing because the number of useful pages indexed in a meaningful way is an issue for me. I don’t jump up and down for Exalead’s free Web search because the span of results seems narrow and stale for some of my queries.I don’t like Google as much as I did in 2006 because relevance seems to be—ah, how shall I phrase it—situational.
So it is not surprising that DuckDuckGo is showing a rise in usage. You can get the metrics which are causing some azure chip consultants to crank up their sales efforts for a special Web search usage report. You can see some of the DuckDuckGo data in “DuckDuckGo Searches Going Waaaaay Up.” The data show DuckDuckGo enjoying an increase in usage. Assume the data in the write up are accurate. DuckDuckGo has doubled its direct queries, nosing close to one million queries. Here is the key passage:
For the first time ever since the search engine opened its doors, it received more than 1 million direct search queries. These are generated by direct user requests. Api requests sit steady at the ten million per day mark.
Last I heard, Google was in the three billion queries per day territory. Big difference. Real growth but I think more “semi real” when compared to Google’s traffic. Worth monitoring the trend, however.
Stephen E Arnold, February 19, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Comments
2 Responses to “DuckDuckGo Excitement: Real or Semi Real?”
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
DuckDuckGo is a joke, probably what they’re doing to return search results is to retrieve cached google queries from a few years ago.
Try to find anything new on that thing – I really wonder why some people bother to use anything other than Google.
Plenty of reasons not to use Google nowadays. (Their attempts to push Google+ via search results also reduce the relevancy of their results.)
I really like the way DuckDuckGo presents their search results, which seem to be both helpful and relevant, and nicely displayed.
And I love the fact that you can use DuckDuckGo to send search queries to other search engines when needed – very handy when I want to quick search for something on YouTube (!yt), or search Javascript documentation (!js) to jog my memory.
Above all, I like the fact that DuckDuckGo is just a search engine, designed to help you find what you’re looking for and send you elsewhere – just like what Google used to be.