Safari to Include DuckDuckGo as a Built-In Search Option

http://daringfireball.net/linked/2014/06/02/duckduckgo

by antr • 12 years ago

363 117 12 years ago

daringfireball.net

tomrod• 12 years ago

How is duckduckgo's search quality nowadays?

mey2• 12 years ago

I've switched over to it for 90% of requests. The only thing I find really fails are very precise technical questions.

Edit: Let me rephrase, it's my default search engine. If the result isn't great, I may rerun it with !g which will then forward my request on to google. Makes it really easy to migrated while still being able to fall back when needed.

gcb02• 12 years ago

I have one default search engine on each computer/device... drives me crazy most of the time.

Yeah, google is still the best for SOME technical term. if it has too much symbols, yahoo/bing/duck are better.... but only so slightly.

the scary part is that even google still being the best, technical terms results are becoming awful everywhere.

logn• 12 years ago

I agree with this. For programming issues I normally use !g to search Google. I suspect Google is better for programming queries because they did a lot of indexing of newsgroups, blogs, and StackOverflow. But for everyday queries, DDG works fine (and I prefer it to Google as I don't usually want to see Google Reviews/Maps/Plus links in the top 50% of the screen area... and I don't need to see results for alternate queries on the bottom 50%).

dredmorbius19• 12 years ago

For technical questions, my first go-to is generally StackExchange (!so) or a site-specific search (w3.org is great for specific CSS spec queries which I seem to have been doing a lot lately) via DDG bang syntax. Google's my third choice.

jlarocco2• 12 years ago

Agreed, but only for "real" questions.

Meaning, if I just need to RTFM, DDG finds it for me. If I search for "Pymongo find function" it will return the documentation I want. If I'm having a problem or debugging something not explained in the manual, there's a slight chance I'll have to use !g and use Google. If I search for "Pymongo find function not returning all results while sorting" I might need Google.

The number of searches where I've had to use Google has decreased significantly in the last year.

nfriedly2• 12 years ago

I'm in about the same boat as mey. It's my default search engine, and I rarely fall back to google.

On the occasion when I do see oddball results, I report them and it gets straightened out promptly. (It's kind of awesome to be able to report a spam site, get a human response, and have the site removed within a day or two. I'm sure it won't be that way forever, but their results also keep getting better and better.)

mey2• 12 years ago

I did not know you could do that, how is reporting done?

jmgrosen• 12 years ago

It's my default search engine... but I find myself going to Google for about 75% of searches -- at least for my searches, they just aren't good enough yet.

dredmorbius19• 12 years ago

I've been using it exclusively as my primary search for a year now, and it's as good as or better than Google for nearly all purposes.

You can re-run any search on google with the "!g" bang notation (or "!sp" for a proxied StartPage search, which is nearly the same).

The recent UI changes have been nice (my biggest observation was that my local CSS changes no longer actually change anything about the site, which is to say, my annoyances have all been addressed).

The primary lacking features are date-bounded search (I still use Google for this), and certain specialized searches (e.g., Google Books, Google Scholar, Google News), though DDG have been expanding their tools, and I'm increasingly using site-specific searches (e.g., reddit, HN, StackExchange, and certain blogs) rather than general Web searches.

sleepyhead• 12 years ago

Love the bang keywords. Using !g less and less now, especially after the upgrade last week.

arrrg• 12 years ago

Nice, but they should open up everything more and let people install any search engine. Apple did open up quite a bit today (in terms of letting others access their platform in places where Apple previously was the sole decider), so it’s not unlikely to eventually happen.

gcb02• 12 years ago

Apple is not about giving the user control. it is about damaging competitors.

My guess is that they were testing a new search engine, and since they gave that up/wasn't done in time/turned too expensive, they just put duck duck there. or maybe they didn't even tried... anway, that does not matter. Since the point was not to have a search engine, it was to not have google by default until google pay it up to be there.

...the fact that you hope apple will relinquish control of any aspect of your mac/ios usage is cute.

hcarvalhoalves• 12 years ago

You can set the search provider on current Safari, so I'm guessing there'll be a way to install a system-wide search provider.

That would be very handy and I can see Spotlight being a lot more powerful if that's possible (integrating with specialized fact DBs, SaaS, etc.).

Brakenshire• 12 years ago

Be interesting to see whether it has any effect on the numbers:

https://duckduckgo.com/traffic.html

stardotstar• 12 years ago

Wow! Look at the surge in the traffic after "Surveillance revelations". Future look very optimistic for DDG.

Holbein3• 12 years ago

Search engine placement is big business - doesn't Firefox make millions each year with Google referrals?

Apple did not add ddg in the past few years despite people asking them to, which might indicate that Apple, too, asks for money for these referrals.

So this begs the question - how how much did ddg have to pay?

sheetjs• 12 years ago

doesn't Firefox make millions each year with Google referrals?

Mozilla grossed 311M for FY2012, almost all of which came from their deal with google: https://static.mozilla.com/moco/en-US/pdf/Mozilla_Audited_Fi...

devNoise• 12 years ago

I wonder if they had to pay or if Apple decided to include of free in our post Snowden era.

A couple of years ago, I was at a ddg hackathon when inclusion came up. I believe they mentioned that it was on the order of a 7 digit number to be include in the list of search engine. Regardless of how much it was, they couldn't justify spending that much money on being include in Apple devices.

ChrisLTD• 12 years ago

Awesome. I've been using a router hack* to accomplish this on iOS, but it'll be nice to have DuckDuckGo when I'm not on my home network.

* http://chrisltd.com/blog/2013/04/duck-duck-go-iphone-ipad/

JohnTHaller3• 12 years ago

Wait, iOS won't let you customize your search engine beyond the 3 presets?!? Just... wow.

burkaman• 12 years ago

Android doesn't either, it gives you the same three presets.

Holbein3• 12 years ago

From the article: "Private Browsing mode — which doesn’t save your browsing history"

I wonder whether iCloud tabs still work in private browsing mode. In other words, do Apple and others still get to see all your supposedly "private" URLs?

gergles• 12 years ago

No, they don't. This feature already exists, and private tabs don't go to iCloud.

Holbein3• 12 years ago

Good to know, thanks!

k-mcgrady2• 12 years ago

Just set it as my default on iOS and searched for osx 10.10 Top part of the screen shows a Wikipedia result and the remainder shows an ad. Switching back to google.

If they can make that mobile UI much better I'll make it my default but I've essentially done a search and saw no results without having to scroll.

r00fus3• 12 years ago

I presume you're on iOS8 beta? Presumably when iOS8 goes gold in the fall, the DDG landing page for mobile users will be greatly improved.

This is a great partnership, as both companies, unlike Google, seem to see privacy as a major feature.

k-mcgrady2• 12 years ago

I don't see why their mobile page should be different when iOS 8 is reelased. It's the same problem I have with their desktop site actually. The quick answer box at the top of search results that thinks it knows what I want takes up way too much space.

moyaRD• 12 years ago

For months i have been in transition to DuckDuckGo. The only missing bit was native search in safari for iOS and OSX. This definitely seal the deal. And is good for all the industry that a viable second choice exist to bring balance to the force , and bring humility to google monopoly in search.

pervycreeper• 12 years ago

Meanwhile, 10.10 will track more keystrokes and gather more personal data than ever. Doesn't have anything to do with privacy. More to do with being at war with Google.

r00fus3• 12 years ago

Can you give me more specifics as to what's being captured?

kevinh• 12 years ago

Typing in the search field on iOS 8 will fetch web results as well, which means some web server is being hit with what you're typing. Spotlight on Yosemite is getting a similar feature as well.

DigitalSea• 12 years ago

This is fantastic news for DuckDuckGo and for Apple. A nice solid search engine coupled with a nice new redesign. If I were Google I would be a little bit worried DuckDuckGo are steadily stealing users. They converted me.

zmmmmm• 12 years ago

Is Google still the default?

sudont• 12 years ago

Yes, via a new install to an iPad.

kome• 12 years ago

So, yandex basically.

mmahemoff2• 12 years ago

I thought something might be up when I saw Gabriel's unassuming tweet.

https://twitter.com/yegg/status/473545653667102721

Personally I'm hoping DDG will at some point pick up the slack from Google dropping the Discussions tab (forum search). Evidently it wasn't so popular, but I found it hugely useful for researching product decisions and haven't found a good alternative. Seems like it could be a good niche to cover.

silverbax88• 12 years ago

Agreed on this. I think the quality of Google searches has gone down dramatically for this type of search, because forum posts are often where people have questions answered. It's not just product research; programming, homework questions, general subject matter, all are often answered best in forum posts.

mmahemoff2• 12 years ago

Could be. I'm not really sure if the quality of search went down, it seems to be a lot better imo after Panda+Penguin purged a lot of ridiculously spammy pages; but I still want a way to just search discussions.

dredmorbius19• 12 years ago

This makes perfect sense in light of the growing relationship status of Apple and Google as major competitors in devices space (Android and iOS), and as such, it's a brilliant strategic move on Apple's part. DDG have made the first real inroads in search in over a decade, and they've done so quietly.

I can think of a number of widely touted alternatives which utterly failed to do so: Cuil, Bing, Blekko, A9, Teoma, and more (a DDG search shows a bunch of skeletons: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22new+search+engine%22+challenge+...). None has had the traction DDG seems to have garnered.

I see a confluence of a number of things:

• Snowden. People are now privacy conscious, and aware of the tremendous amount of information disclosed in Web searches. DDG's huge traffic spike following the Snowden disclosures is testimony to this: https://duckduckgo.com/traffic.html

• Google is the one to beat. Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Rackspace, and others see Google as their primary competition. This creates an alignment of interests among them.

• Google has shown vulnerabilities. Failures to execute on a string of social efforts, most recently G+, as well as an increasing sense of distraction, as well as possible signs of weakness in its core search business, suggest a vulnerable underside to Google. DDG isn't big enough to cause real damage yet, but it can certainly get Google's attention.

• Democratization of search. Was a time when massive datacenter investments were necessary for search. That's both no longer the case, and DC infrastructure's getting cheaper, both of which cut away at Google's core competency and advantage.

• Google's lost its favored status among the technorati. While it's not clear who's won that crown, there's an increasing strong sense among many that Google have failed at their "don't be evil" pledge, have disappointed users, and simply don't have the chops they once demonstrated.

• Specialized search is making inroads. OpenStreetMap is taking on geosearch, Wolfram+Alpha and Knoema specialized data search, Wikipedia is a basic more-or-less-trusted repository of actual information (as opposed to random Web sites), Amazon is a product and bibliographic research library. There are places to go for information which, if you've got a specific interest, are better than Google, and they're carving off bits of the search market.

So, yes, for the first time in 15 years, search looks like it may be ripe for a bit of disruption.

Don't get me wrong: Google does some things amazingly well. Date-bounded Web searches still draw me back (I did some here to turn up a few of the more obscure search contenders from the early 2000s), the Google Books Ngram viewer is fucking awesome, Google Trends isn't bad, and a few other elements. Reliability of Google services is amazing. But there are chinks in the armor.

Pacabel3• 12 years ago

One thing that worries me about DDG is their recent UI redesign.

It felt, and still feels, to me very much like the failed UI redesigns we've seen from Google as of late.

Even after giving it some time, I still don't think I'm better off with DDG's redesigned site than I was with its old design back at the beginning of May.

It may not be a complete UI disaster like the Google Maps redesign, for example, but it's still unfortunately a step in that direction. I sincerely hope this isn't a continuing trend with DDG.

dredmorbius19• 12 years ago

I'm not a huge fan if site redesigns. This one bothers me very little. And it may even be an improvement.

And that is very high praise.

nsmartt2• 12 years ago

Has the DDG user experience suffered? If so, how? I much prefer the redesign, and I'm not yet aware of having lost anything in the move.

timr2• 12 years ago

"I can think of a number of widely touted alternatives which utterly failed to do so: Cuil, Bing, Blekko, A9, Teoma, and more"

Fanchildren, stop. You know that DDG is an untenable alternative without Bing, right? Sure, they do a little bit of their own result integration, but when you actually compare results side by side, there are very few differences:

http://www.bing.com/search?q=apple https://duckduckgo.com/?q=apple

http://www.bing.com/search?q=bill+gates https://duckduckgo.com/?q=bill+gates

http://www.bing.com/search?q=elliptic+curve https://duckduckgo.com/?q=elliptic+curve

http://www.bing.com/search?q=paul+graham https://duckduckgo.com/?q=paul+graham

http://www.bing.com/search?q=rubber+tree https://duckduckgo.com/?q=rubber+tree

My point is not that DDG shouldn't exist, or that it won't diverge, but that to claim that DDG has traction that Bing does not is silly. Bing is larger (and more popular: it's a top-50 global website!) than DDG, and it is clearly providing much of the technical infrastructure for DDG.

dredmorbius19• 12 years ago

I'm aware that DDG relies heavily on Bing. But that only highlights the dynamic at play: the issue hasn't been technical elements of delivering search results, but providing a compelling case to switch.

There's the additional situation that I'm absolutely no fan of Microsoft and trust them to my search data even less than I do Google. Handing either my queries via anonymizing proxies is rather more palatable, however.

DDG's share of search is still small, but its growth rate is on fire. It also seems to be largely organic (today's announcement by Apple would be an exception to this), which strikes me as generally more persuasive than growth driven by various sorts of gimmickery (see the extensive manipulations of web server stats Microsoft attempted through the years largely through changing parked domain hosting status).

Do you have a reference for search engine ranking? I'm not turning up any clear stats, though from Fool.com I get a reference to 4.7 million queries/day vs. 3 billion for Google. That puts DDG at 1/640th Google's traffic, though as I said: growing quickly.

http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2014/04/07/how-duckduc...

erichurkman• 12 years ago

To me, this screams that there's an interface problem for other search engines. Google gained the majority of market share when they were providing clean and simple search results while competitors littered pages with tons of ads, banners, "curated" (often shoddy, paid) content, and oh-so-many portals.

Bing's search results are OK, but when you compare the search result pages, DuckDuckGo is much cleaner and easier to navigate even with the same results. Google is almost as bad as Bing now, where the number of ads outnumber actual search results.

Bing, to me, tries too hard to be a destination, rather than a highly tuned tool to help me find websites.

sirdogealot• 12 years ago

Bing was actually more accurate than DDG.

It provided a local apple store which I know of as the 5th result when DDG just showed the generic untargeted bing results.

Vik1ng• 12 years ago

• Specialized search is making inroads.

>> !Bang https://duckduckgo.com/bang.html

Personally it's not really my thing, but a lot of users really seem to love this, especially when having DuckDuckGo as default search bar.

---

And I agree OpenStreetMap will probably be a really big factor in the future. Especially considering how objects can be directly linked to Wikidata and other services.

dredmorbius19• 12 years ago

OSM are also hitting Google via sites and API licensing and limitations. That's an increasing pain point.

untothebreach2• 12 years ago

It really shines for me, since I have pentadactyl installed in my firefox. From the blank tab page, I can be searching github (or the python docs, or <insert one of the multitude of !searches here) with the following keystrokes:

  o !github language:python

'o' tells pentadactyl to go to a url. When I don't give it a URL it instead sends what I type to my default search engine.

The funny thing is that unless I am actually searching DDG, I almost never see it.

Sure you could do this by defining a whole bunch of search aliases, but it is more fun to think, "I wonder if I can search the Arch Wiki from here," type `o !arch some search`, and all of a sudden find yourself on the arch wiki search page.

jonathansizz• 12 years ago

You mean that DDG offers the illusion of privacy, right? It's more than a little naive to think that the NSA won't be able to pull data without needing the cooperation of DDG (and they're obviously not dissuaded from doing so by any laws). We also don't know about any secret court orders that may or may not have been issued to DDG compelling them to turn over data. And how are we supposed to know that DDG haven't done a deal with Microsoft to pass on data under threat of being closed down, or even that they follow their stated privacy policy?

I'm not suggesting that any of these scenarios have necessarily taken place, but we'd have no way of knowing if they have. Also, the more popular DDG becomes, the more tempting a target it becomes to the NSA et al.

So by all means use DDG if you like its other features, but try to be realistic about privacy.

LeoPanthera• 12 years ago

That doesn't mean we should do nothing. Using DDG may make it harder for the NSA - and that's a start. At least we're trying.

For many people, the NSA isn't even the problem. Google is the problem.

weavejester3• 12 years ago

"It's more than a little naive to think that the NSA won't be able to pull data without needing the cooperation of DDG"

How would they do this?

It's possible there are SSL flaws the NSA knows about that the public does not, but I can't think of many other ways the NSA could achieve this through technological means.

There could be a secret court order forcing DDG to place monitoring hardware on their internal network, but given that they're basing a business on privacy, this would be corporate suicide. DDG aren't behaving in a manner that suggests they believe they're living on borrowed time.

jeorgun• 12 years ago

Pretty much their entire pitch is that they don't store the data[1]. I don't really see how they can be forced to give up data they don't have.

[1] https://duckduckgo.com/privacy#s3

S4M• 12 years ago

When I think of privacy, I don't think too much of the NSA. Rather, I am much more concerned about Google storing every search I do to show me more relevant ads, because, hey, I'm not comfortable with being sold to advertisers.

Now, if I was really paranoid about NSA or wanted to hide stuff, I would use much more radical measures - say: using linux Tails, only browsing with Tor, and possibly from a public network whenever possible (in order to use a different IP each time).

For me, DDG is a decent middle ground. I suppose the NSA could track my search history if they really wanted to, but meanwhile it's a bit harder for them and I am less targeted by advertisement.

dredmorbius19• 12 years ago

With Google, you've got tracking cookies, logged-in sessions, and IP-based tracking to deal with.

For DDG, with a surveillance proxy installed, you're limited to IP + browser fingerprinting. You can largely defeat both with the addition of privoxy and TOR. I agree that, were DDG compelled to install monitoring equipment, their assurances are fairly thin defense. But they are an improvement over the status quo.

Meanwhile, you'll also escape the sort of snooping and across-the-net following side-effects of advertising and marketing:

https://smoncelle.wordpress.com/2014/04/28/hiding-a-pregnanc...

DDG's claims of not tracking are auditable, though I'm not aware that they've actually been audited. It absolutely is a step in the right direction.

cpeterso2• 12 years ago

So, yes, for the first time in 15 years, search looks like it may be ripe for a bit of disruption.

If Mozilla switched Firefox's default search engine to Bing (or even Yahoo!), Google's dominance of everything internet might get some healthy competition. Google fans would howl for a day (then simply switch Firefox's search setting back to Google), but hundreds of millions of other Firefox users wouldn't care.

alexqgb• 12 years ago

Actually, they would, since doing so would cause their finances to implode. Defaulting to Google is how they keep the lights on.

http://www.infoworld.com/t/open-source-software/who-still-pa...

curiousDog• 12 years ago

Are you saying DDG is better that Bing? You can't actually be serious!

dredmorbius19• 12 years ago

If your concern is privacy, then DDG's "no tracking" pledge offers an additional value-add over bing.

DDG's use of additional search engines other than bing (mostly for ancillary responses AFAICT -- the primary Web results seem to rely heavily on bing) is another differentiator, and can add value.

Likewise the bang syntax.

psychometry• 12 years ago

Can you elaborate on why massive datacenters are no longer necessary for search technology?

dredmorbius19• 12 years ago

Mostly Moore's Law: costs of hardware keep falling. The initial Google search clusters were pretty small, a half dozen or so systems, though the Web was also a small fraction of its size.

The aspects of this I see being possible game-changers across the hosted SAAS space are of 1) autoconfiguring cheap systems, 2) better residential broadband, and 3) distributed tools which work very effectively even with tremendous decentralization.

On a per-user basis, the amount of compute resources allocated by even very large sites is relatively small. You can provision as much on your own. What providers do offer are engineering, robustness, reliability, and data redundancy.

Engineering can be provided through self-configuring systems -- a Debian base, set of packages, autoconfiguration, and a minimal set of things the user needs to worry about, and you're up and running. With SSD / flash drives, you buy yourself around much of the seek latency of spinning rust.

Robustness and reliability through a grid-provisioned service would ensure that the system as a whole is up even if individual nodes are offline. You'd also need some smarts against attacks, but if the system could communicate among nodes indicating what traffic is considered harmful it should be reasonably self-healing.

Data redundancy can be provided through sharding and replication schemes. Figuring out how to account for balance of data of a given node (if you want to load a lot you've got to offer a lot, and/or obtain credits somehow, perhaps through payment).

The one additional benefit DCs provide is for very rapid communications between nodes -- < 0.001s, sometimes better, latencies, rather than 0.01s - 0.1s between Internet sites (sometimes worse). This matters for multi-tier applications where web proxies, application engines, and databases need to talk to one another.

And if you do need some DC infrastructure, costs for that are falling (and capabilities increasing) such that much of it can be provided on a light budget (traffic costs are likely your biggest concern).

What I see is an erosion of the technological limitations which have made the present commercial model viable and/or necessary. Which suggests that it may be increasingly supplanted, especially for mature spaces.

Justsignedup• 12 years ago

DDG's traction is quite simple actually:

Bing (and Yahoo), etc are all competing against google at pretty much Google's game. We already know Google will win at Google's game. They make the rules, they hold the keys.

DDG played a different game. It attacked the hacker sphere. It then gave people something they want, privacy. And the quality was good.

Note: Android still does not allow DDG as the search engine, and makes every damn effort to ensure Google is the search engine used. And of course note that DDG, being the only real competitor is magically excluded from relevancy. But no matter, soon, soon.

jeena2• 12 years ago

If you use Firefox on android, like me, you can add DDG as your default search engine, as I just did after reading your comment.

jelv• 12 years ago

Wow DDG is finaly bigger then Ixquick (that other big privacy search engine).

Average direct queries may: - Ixquick/StartPage 5,076,959 (source: https://www.startpage.com/traffic/) - DuckDuckGo 5,314,203 (source: https://duckduckgo.com/traffic.html)

And they do it with a better looking interface too. Let's hope DDG's land a default spot on Firefox or Safari soon. They both lack there own search engine and are competing with the Google and Microsoft on some level.

jlarocco2• 12 years ago

Well, at least I like one thing Apple's doing.

MiguelHudnandez• 12 years ago

The enemy of your enemy is your friend, indeed!

100rsa• 12 years ago

One reason I still not use DDG is no support for language specific search (settings not work). It mixed many similar language in the search result, for example, english and spanish.

stickhandle• 12 years ago

I really really want to like ddg, but I can't seem to get away from a need to !g. Further, though its obviously a loss in privacy, the quality in search results returning from a "context aware" google is just leaps better. Its a trade-off I guess. I know HN is very much in support of the primacy of privacy ... but there is no doubt search and ad relevancy goes down in anonymity.

bjterry• 12 years ago

I've been using DDG for quite a while now, and I've noticed in the last few weeks or months that their search results have gotten much better. Before I'd have to use !g on most of my queries, but now it's much more of a rarity.

Safari to Include DuckDuckGo as a Built-In Search Option

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