Caught this on SEL today
Could DuckDuckGo Be The Biggest Long-Term Threat To Google?
http://searchengineland.com/could-duckduckgo-be-the-biggest-long-term-threat-to-google-118117
They're growing and I hear a lot of people talking about them due to their promises not to track you. I like the clean SERPs, but I haven't used them enough to tell whether they are going to give me the same quality I'm used to at GG. I may need to set them as my default SE for a bit...
The chatter I am hearing on bolgs and podcasts sounds a lot like the stuff we all heard in the forums when Google was the upstart chacing AltaVista, Excite, et. al. Could DDG give GG a run for its money?
not unless they change the name. Needs to be a bit snappier and less likely to make 12 year olds laugh to be a world beater I think.
They do seem fairly good for any of the international searches I look at, but they're too US-centric for me to use on a regular basis without getting frustrated.
Their Japanese language search isn't too bad. However, without knowing where you are, like GG, they don't reflect local search as well for me. So if I search in English for something local to me in Japan I don't get the same quality SERPs as I would from GG.
well they have that local operator r:uk but unless I'm using it wrong it doesn't seem to make much difference
I think the article is on to something: DDG is providing a very clean serp right at a time when people are getting annoyed by all the garbage Google is serving. It is not that DDGs algo is better. Combine that with the privacy issue and some good timing and DDG is catching on at least in the US.
There is something appealing and of course there's no loyalty to search engines. But I think it will be a long, hard-fought, trench warfare battle.
Obviously, though, search engines don't breed any loyalty. I have no investment so the cost to me of switching is close to zero, unlike email providers (thus GMail), calendar and scheduling (thus Google Calendar), photo sharing (thus Picasa), social networking (thus G+ .. ok, I'm joking this time).
Search is more challenging to keep your customers, because you have to be better today. Being better yesterday is good enough if you're an email provider (anyone using Outlook?) but not if you're a search provider.
So Google knows
- someone is going to come up with better algorithms
- computing horsepower will get to the point that the server cost will fall to make it possible for a small player to mount a serious challenge.
Right now, DDG is at a huge disadvantage in terms of getting me to switch. Why? I don't actually care that much about switching to get slightly better results on easy searches where Google already adequately meets my needs. When I comparison shop, it's because I've come up against an obcure search where I am having trouble finding anything at all. I do tons of these searches on obscure topics. And when I try Bing or DDG, they simply do not have the index that Google has. Google results are mediocre. Bing and DDG have nothing at all.
Why? Some of it is simply age (Google's been crawling a lot longer) and horsepower (the Google crawl is massive). Google knows both of those advantages won't last long, so it resorts to other means. Exhibit A: Google Books - this is the single, defining characteristic of Google that is hugely useful for the type of searches that I do, and currently, those materials are not available to public crawl. From a search engine perspective, this is proprietary information for Google. Google Scholar too expands the SERPS dramatically for many topics and, again, from an SE perspective, this is proprietary knowledge.
So for the easy searches, I don't really care. For the hard searches, Google always wins right now. So I will not change my default search box because I only know for sure that something is a hard search after I fail.
I also think personalized search, essentially a failure right now, has the same potential if perfected to lock you into a system as email does. If the personalized search learning system were a really, really good self-learning system (which eventually it will be), it would understand syntax and nuance in my queries and I would be able to ask questions like "I want to know about Jean Chautemps in Genève, but not the one I usually ask about" and it would exempt results regarding the guy I'm usually interested in.
I think there's a race to make personalized results have enough value to be a barrier to leaving Google before
- privacy issues make the masses leave Google
- some set of brilliant theorists come up with totally new algorithms (perhaps based on the ability to actually *understand* content)
- server costs and bandwidth fall to the point that indexing hundreds of billions of text pages is within reach a garage business
All that to say that the privacy issues hurt Google and push people to DDG in the short term, but if Google doesn't do something then long term, those people are eventually going somewhere else anyway. If I'm Google, I need to find means to set the activation energy for switching to another provider as high as possible.
Thats the best post i've read in ages as to why its an uphill struggle to displace Google and I completely agree
Thanks Jason - I wonder if you could elaborate a bit on where you think personalized search could go, for good or ill. Of all the folks here, you're probably most able to have something useful to say there.
Who knows how it will all shake out. Wells Fargo and American Express are not very successful in the express mail business anymore, but here they are 160 and 162 years later, respectively (and both counted Henry Wells and William Fargo among their founders not, I'm sure, incidentally).
There is a big difference in the chatter surrounding DDG to that which was around Google before it went mainstream: Who is chattering.
All the chatter around DDG seems to be from search folk. With Google is certainly started in technical areas, but they were much wider (admittedly web has much smaller). A lot of the DDG talk seems to be wishful thinking based on a desperate hope for another choice from those making their living around search. This is really different to the "Wow - that is fast, wow that is accurate" talk that used to surround Google.
I don't think the privacy angle is enough.
Rooftop, I'm not sure I agree. I'm hearing a lot of chatter attributed to Anonymous, the hacker group, that they like DDG. This has caught the attention of the counter-culture crowd and given DDG a certain anti-Establishment chic. This has gotten DDG more mentions in the main stream media.
The other place I'm hearing buzz about DDG is the open source community.
Search people are talking about DDG but really only after the first two got started. Still the search crowd were early adopters of Google and did a lot to help Google get traction in the early days before Yahoo started using them as backfill.
Where I see DDG as vulnerable is in mobile/local search. Will people use Google on their phone but turn to DDG on their laptop or tablet? I do but I'm not convinced Joe Public will.
I do think Google is vulnerable on their serp presentation: Google is an ad company now so it is hard for them to clear the ads off their serp. Ditto for the portal stuff - it is hard for Google to not push their other properties in the serps which makes it harder and harder to clean up their presentation.
QuoteThere is a big difference in the chatter surrounding DDG to that which was around Google before it went mainstream: Who is chattering.
(haven't read the article or every post yet)
The big difference too is how bad search was when G first came out, it was so light years ahead of the competition it didn't take too long to make the switch. I think the only advantage DDG has at this point is the do not track thing. Until that fear hits the mainstream, I am not sure DDG can get the traction until they become "enough better" than Google to get a larger market to switch.
I think the bigger G competitors come from an Apple or Facebook closed platform teaming up a Bing, Blekko, or buying out DDG and integrating. You may have seen the rumor that MS pitched Bing to FB not too long ago.
Quote from: JamesR on April 27, 2012, 09:18:29 PM
I think the bigger G competitors come from an Apple or Facebook closed platform teaming up a Bing, Blekko, or buying out DDG and integrating. You may have seen the rumor that MS pitched Bing to FB not too long ago.
I thought Bing search was already integrated into FB, and they've cut a deal.
Good points made in this thread, yes DDG would benefit from a buyout.
What about Twitter buying the DDG search platform and then using the Twitter search they've got as a "real time search" that'd be the best move IMO.
DDG is vulnerable because it relies on other search engines for most of its database. DDG has its own crawler but also uses Blekko, Entireweb and Bing plus some specialized sources like Wikipedia. DDG then layers in its own algo and pulls in different results for different queries. A repackager.. But the depth is from Bing and if Bing decided to pull the plug there isn't really anyone to replace them.
Oh and they use Yahoo Pipes to put this together so there is another point of vulnerability.
Related:
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/feeds/tired-of-using-google-search-try-duckduckgo/4782? and
http://www.webmonkey.com/2012/05/duckduckgo-search-engine-crowd-sources-plugins/
These just in todays news feed. Seems like everyday there is a couple of new articles on DDG. Bing making it in too. All the Google news is negative.