So, as I promised, my review of DuckDuckGo.
Sorry for the mistake earlier today, where WordPress got a bit trigger happy and published a test article! This is the real thing and to make up for it, here are some Japanese Seizure Robots.
As I started, I loved DuckDuckGo.
- I like its very simple design, speed, direct and not-personalised results
- I liked its lack of advertising
- I liked its removal of spam and pages ranked through shady techniques
But it just didn’t do it for me. I think Google has grabbed an element of trust from myself, BUT…that is not to say that the SERP’s it returns are very interesting. For example. SEO Newcastle on Duck and Google return totally different results:
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The good thing is that my rant from a few weeks back about SEO still being ugly has been answered by Duck. As you can see from the images above, the results are very different, and I have found the results from Duck hold a much greater user value. By this I mean, I am still noticing a great deal of spam and c**p on Google, but Duck sees this and throws spam way down its one page SERP.
Also because Duck focuses on the Search and less on the analytics, its page is much quicker:
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What Duck offers apart from a Cleaner, Faster and more Relevant Search Engine is a whole new approach to privacy, noted in their open traffic data:
What is most interesting here is the HUGE increase around Data Privacy Day which not only more than doubled Duck’s traffic, but stayed stable as a Duck became a serious alternative to Google and other major Search Engines. Not bad for a small start-up from an Entrepreneur.
So, I think that DuckDuckGo is fantastic. In a short space of time, their concept has been strongly focused on relevance and whilst it will take time for myself and others to gradually learn to “duck it” instead of “Google it”, I think the future for Duck can only get stronger.
Put it this way. Whilst I have not fully converted yet, I used to add &pws=0 to the end of my Google searches to remove all of the personalised and local crap when trying to research cold result data. Now I use DuckDuckGo as an authority.
Fantastic work guys! I am looking forward to what happens next.
