DuckDuckGo's market share has grown to around 2.5% globally despite the friction, suggesting that a meaningful minority of users will switch when given clearer choices.

▲ godelski 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

I'm one of those people. It seems like all search engines give pretty similar results, so why not use the one with more privacy? I can even do a quick LLM ask on DDG and with different models. Helpful when search terms are not getting the right match.

I think most people's judgement about DDG is from a few uses and from some time ago. It's worth giving it a shot if you haven't in awhile. But give it a real shot, like use it for a few days to get over the "I hate it because it's different" game that our minds play.

And a major benefit now is you don't just get a fucking popup on your phone every time you're just trying to search something. Like seriously, wtf google. Needy much?

▲ PunchTornado 3 days ago | parent [-]

because behind DDG is bing, microsoft, one of the evilest companies on earth.

▲ godelski 3 days ago | parent [-]

DDG has its own crawler, but yes, it does get most of its index from Bing. But I believe also from places like Yandex (or used to).

I'm no Microsoft fan, but man you're splitting hairs here. And most of the non-Google engines get a good portion of their index from Bing because it is available and saves everyone from getting scraped to death. Though I guess that's happening now anyways...

https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/sources

	▲	avar 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		`> it does get most of its index from Bing` Its "index from Bing" makes it sound like they're paying to rsync-ing over the raw results of Bing's crawler from Microsoft or something. My understanding is that they're simply running a Bing search through Microsoft's API, so Microsoft is getting your search queries in real time. But you (supposedly) get the added anonymity of that going through DDG's servers, and their promise not to do some of their own tracking to put the two together, and they combine Bing's results with their own crawled results. Isn't that how it works?

▲ weatherlite 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

2.5% is a very small share

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input_sh 3 days ago | parent [-]

One out of every 40 searches worldwide being made using your product is, in your opinion, a very small share?

In a thread about a monopoly abusing its power, the least you can do is to stop measuring success by how monopolistic a company is.

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weatherlite 2 days ago | parent [-]

> One out of every 40 searches worldwide being made using your product is, in your opinion, a very small share?

I meant in terms of Google's dominance in search. Currently, not even ChatGPT / LLM search are shrinking Google's dominance - Google keeps growing search traffic and revenue. It does seem though that the whole search market has grown with LLMs , people now query for stuff they've never queried before.

> In a thread about a monopoly abusing its power, the least you can do is to stop measuring success by how monopolistic a company is.

How do you measure success then? All companies want to dominate their industries why are we picking on Google? This is capitalism.

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input_sh 2 days ago | parent [-]

You're absolutely right, we shouldn't pick on just Google. We should pick on basically every company that owns over 50% of its market share, as I'm sure how they got there is by abusing their power in one way or the other.

A healthy economy is the one where you have 50 smaller companies each with 2.5% market share, not one with over 80% and everyone else being called a failure like you just did. Hope that clears things up!

	▲	weatherlite 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		It's not clear to me why Google has to be broken up. Google built the best browser around, people aren't using it for no reason, and then it used its user base to direct them to their search - which to me sounds reasonable (most people would use Google for search even if they're on a different browser. Whether it's habit or simply a superior search engine - that's what they want). Making Google sell chrome, to me , wouldn't be different than making Nvidia sell a big part of their GPU know how or making Microsoft sell Windows or making Apple get rid of the App Store.