I hadn't looked at DuckDuckGo for a long time, but having just run a few queries, I was very pleasantly surprised at how good the results were.

The results actually look a lot like Google's did before the Panda and Penguin changes.

"We are considering adding result previews to DuckDuckGo."
[duck.co...]

We will ban you as soon as you try to do so DDG.

Good to see DDG do well. What currently stops me from using it as my default engine is the geotargeting level. I can select a country but I can't select a region.

I think the next stage for them is to get as many services to give them the default status. It's now default on Gnome and Tor Browser Bundle already but really needs a big and cool company to give them a chance.

We will ban you as soon as you try to do so DDG.

:) yeah, some people just can't take a hint. Many companies have assumed that visitors would love previews. Excite failed, SearchMe failed, even Google ditched the previews. Why, you might be wondering...

sadly in the UK they don't even know this SE and like lemmings just keep heading the G ....

DDG is the only serious challenger (if they can be called that) to Google.

By contrast, Google does nearly 6 billion every day so, no, DDG is nothing. Even Bing loses two billion dollars of Microsoft's money every year.

DDG is the only serious challenger (if they can be called that) to Google.

They don't have the cash...the only challenger is when isearch comes out as they have the branding and fans that will support search. I just hope it does as we need a creditable alternative to power mad G

considering that many professional webmasters have excluded all bots other than google and bing from indexing their websites - under these circumstances, will alternative search engines have a chance at all in the future?

i think it's a futile task for yandex, duckduckgo et al to convince all webmasters to include their bots for crawling. these search engines will only ever get a fraction of the web indexed compared to the big g. less indexed pages equals lower quality of selected results equals less attraction for search users. it's a vicious circle and a huge entry barrier that is meanwhile nearly impossible to overcome, don't you think?

only thing i can think of for alternative search engines is if they can manage to merge the useful websites who were degraded by google's terrible algorithm updates into their index. so that they can compete maybe not in quantity but in quality standards and give users more relevant results.

I'd love it DuckDuckGo took off - I have great rankings there. I've seem some pickup in the past year, but hardly enough to impact my business.

DDG has been our main SE for 2 years now and yes we think the results is as good as google, all those big sites are not dominating every result and its not stuffed with ads.

If only they would re-name it. Just saying

Hope DuckDuckGo gets more visitors. Their results are like pre-panda/penguin.. Love it!

Google is great for answering real world questions, but when it comes to money keywords, most of the results are shocking. They serve up junk. I'm guessing Google is purposely doing this to increase their Adwords revenue.

Just checked DDG for keywords for a number of my sites. Oh my - you're right it looks like pre penguin/panda google. Almost every keyword I checked for my site is on page 1. If only I could get that with G!

considering that many professional webmasters have excluded all bots other than google and bing from indexing their websites - under these circumstances, will alternative search engines have a chance at all in the future?

+1

It means that any brand-new search engine will be showing "the best of the rest". Which may not be a bad thing. You don't need yet another search engine to point you to Amazon.

Competition is a good thing, but let's be realistic: Four million queries a day is a drop in the bucket compared to a billion a day. Also, if (say) 50 or 100 million people a day decided to use DuckGoGo, where would DDG get the computing power and bandwidth to handle the load?

the useful websites who were degraded by google's terrible algorithm updates

I am positive almost all were mostly degraded due to their content, and they deserved it, or terrible coding, and they deserved it, too.

In all cases, these updates only affected my clients in a flat to positive way.

Unbelievable - was searching for an article dealing with rebuilding an item - of course with Google first - starting having fits with results that keep sending me to useless site after useless site to the point of breaking computer. Remembered this post - went to duck - Found good info with step by step and diagrams first search - what in the h--- has happened to the google returns.

and they deserved it

maybe, but if you personally have to experience a kind of ban because of whatever (commercially influenced) algorithm change , you'll think otherwise. i as a webmaster know that google doesn't display the best results for every query - users do not necessarily. the user deserves better, but google monopoly stands in the way.

Does every thread at Webmaster World have to turn into a debate about Google?

I thought this thread was about DuckDuckGo.

i don't know much about DuckDuckGo, but don't they use the results, or the API, of other search engines? how far can they realistically go, if they partly rely on using google and bing's stuff? as soon as they threaten the other search engines they will just try and limit their access

I am positive almost all were mostly degraded due to their content, and they deserved it, or terrible coding, and they deserved it, too.

Positively wrong.

but don't they use the results, or the API, of other search engines

crawl results or algorithm results?

If a search engine grows big enough to threaten the Big Names it will surely be big enough to fund its own crawls. So I don't think that's a major worry.

Good results. Clean search. Silly name.

Yes, G should buy them out and name it G2

Good results. Clean search. Silly name.

Ditto. Naming products isn't getting easier though.

I set DuckDuckGo as my default search engine over a year ago and haven't changed it since. This is the first time since Google that I've done that. The fact that it's so easy to search Google with !g and YouTube with !yt, etc helps also.

Silly names can be good. Remember how silly Google sounded at first? And ... it's Perl! [github.com ]

Can Anyone suggest a new name for Duck.
"Duckit"

"Spooked"
In reference to the fact DDG doesn't share data or track users.

According to Danny Sullivan in a post-PRISM post - Duckit or Spooked or whatever will never beat Google. [searchengineland.com...]