Here is another up-and-comer search engine called DuckDuckGo. Their philosophy is to create a better search engine experience by offering more instant answers, less SPAM and clutter, real privacy, and lots of “goodies” such as calculations, conversions, dates, facts and more. Last week, DuckDuckGo announced on their Twitter account that they reached over one million direct searches.
Internet marketers should and need to take notice this as the rising search engine is gaining popularity. Indeed, the company’s traffic records shows that it hit 1,067,006 searches on Monday, February 13. Then, on Valentine’s Day, the search portal broke 1 million searches again, fielding 1,019,602 queries.
The success comes in the aftermath of a new interface DuckDuckGo launched in 2012. The company hoped the update would help it win more users, and so far, the new DuckDuckGo is successfully gaining search ground.
SEO, content and paid search marketers will want to monitor continued growth patterns to see if DuckDuckGo can make a name for itself in search. Indeed, the moment seems ripe for a new player to enter the market as nearly half of searchers say they are frustrated by Google’s recent Search, plus Your World updates.
Duck Duck Go vs. Google
The guys over at Differences Between.Net did a real nice job of highlighting the major differences between the two search engines and here are some of them:
First, Duck Duck Go often displays information above the more traditional results. They call this information “Zero-click Info” because you get it with zero-clicks, i.e. right on the page (in a red box). This information includes topic summaries, images and related topics, and often answers your search queries directly. Other information that Duck Duck Go provides on-site are Category Pages, which group topics about similar concepts. These special pages enable you to discover useful topics related to your search that aren’t in normal search results.
Second, Duck Duck Go uses a proprietary technology called semantic topic detection, which allows them to detect topics within your search queries. If you type in an ambiguous term that can have many meanings, e.g. apple, Duck Duck Go asks you what meaning you want. After you select a meaning, you then get results (and Zero-click Info) that is more targeted to that particular topic. If you type in a search that contains topics within it, Duck Duck Go can also detect those topics and similarly adjust search results to target them in particular.
Third, Duck Duck Go tries to strip out all the “garbage” of usual search result pages, with the primary goal of getting you information faster and with less mental effort. That is, Duck Duck Go has much less clutter, much less ads, and much less spam. When people use Google, they often click forward and back a lot, trying to figure out what’s what and if anything has the info they’re actually looking for. That is because a lot of the information displayed in those results just doesn’t make a lot of sense. Duck Duck Go tries to reduce this so-called “clutter.”
Personal Search Engine Experience
Here are some of my experiences:
- You will not see any “parked” domains. This is something that Google just does not do and has caused a lot more noise within their organic results.
- Lack of local results - I am fine with that for the most part as from a SEO perspective it gives you more real estate for us search engine optimization guys to have!
- Keyword match domains are more relevant in DDG than Google – I did a handful of searches like “tax attorney help“, “auto accident attorneys“, and “new homes” and noticed that the majority of sites within DGD’s SERPS have keyword match domains.
- Both index punctuation.
- Case sensitive searches are much more noticeable on DDG than Google – Actually Google has done a real good job of removing this from their SERPS.
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