We did not really acquire you (at least not yet). Traction is about acquiring real customers (who stick), and if you tried it and left or are thinking of leaving then you are not a real customer yet. I would love to keep you, however!
I'm sorry to hear about your disappointment, but all those things are things we're of course actively working on. If you want to email me at yegg@duckduckgo.com I'd love to get to the bottom of them.
--Speed has improved a lot in the past three months. Where are you located? I'd love to trace this down. 2-3sec is way outside the norm and our internal metrics show much, much lower.
--Same with search quality. We'd love specific examples if you remember any: https://duckduckgo.com/feedback.html -- that's the best way we improve. Are you using a region setting?
--We do not use indirect results by default on our main site. Check out our privacy policy, specifically the section on search leakage: https://duckduckgo.com/privacy.html. On HTML5 browsers we can do an internal postMessage to strip the referrer header in-line. However, if you open in a new tab/window, we cannot do that. Nevertheless, you can turn this behavior off on the main site in the settings (under privacy): https://duckduckgo.com/settings.html. If you're using a modern Safari though, this shouldn't happen. Again, would love to figure this out.
My experience with the search quality are quite similar. While I like the idea and personally would even accept some 5 sec+ delays if the results were at least equal to Google, they are not. Even for relatively simple queries: For example if I search Journal of Brand Management the right url is not even on the whole first page, while at Google it is exactly the first result ( www.palgrave-journals.com/bm ).
Maybe you could add some special "dissatisfying results" button or something like that where we just can enter the keyphrase and a short line what Google did better. Or I wouldn't even mind activating some track-me option occasionally if it would help you guys improve your results. Just let us know how we can help making DDG better.
While I like the idea and personally would even accept some 5 sec+ delays if the results were at least equal to Google, they are not.
..
Or I wouldn't even mind activating some track-me option occasionally if it would help you guys improve your results.
Not everyone has to use DDG because they're worried about privacy. It offers features that Google doesn't have (like that box at the top (though Google has recently added something similar) and suggested additional terms on the side) and there are political/non-product reasons to support a competing search company (Google is practically a monopoly). I guess on rare occasions, the search results may be better, too.
Mainly because of Google's forced integration approach. Google is forcing me to use the same identity on different sites/functions (e.g. Gmail, Seach, YouTube) and I don't like to have my Google Search habits connected to my email profile and so on. If I am offered an easy way to jump out of this loop and get an least somewhat adequate service I am happy to pack my bags.
Yes, make me have to spend as little effort as possible to tell you that the DDG results are worse than goog. It happens about daily, and I just don't have the time to find the feedback form every time.
Understood -- however, if it is easy now that we've communicated -- to just keep a notepad going and then send over a big list, we'd really appreciate it.
We are planning on making that interface better, but if you or anyone else would like to help out before (it really really helps) we'd appreciate compiling a list over a week or so and then sending it in.
- Search example that failed are numerous, I added one to my original post.
- while that setting did indeed do the trick, I contest your default setting. I delete my cookies quite frequently, which will kill those settings. I see that you're trying something good with that feature (preserve my query string from reaching the target site). In this case, your implementation is just not good enough. You should not mess up my browser history in any case. Can't you do this differently?
If you don't mind, I'd love to correspond a bit more over email. I still have lots of questions and something is off with regards to this setting, speed, etc.
For the record, perhaps you got the wrong idea from the post (looking at your new conclusion). At DuckDuckGo, I've tried to avoid these mistakes as best I can.
I'm not trying to make you look bad, I'm just reporting my opinion. It's great that you're answering, already a big plus in my book. Private email sent.
I'm sorry to hear about your disappointment, but all those things are things we're of course actively working on. If you want to email me at yegg@duckduckgo.com I'd love to get to the bottom of them.
--Speed has improved a lot in the past three months. Where are you located? I'd love to trace this down. 2-3sec is way outside the norm and our internal metrics show much, much lower.
--Same with search quality. We'd love specific examples if you remember any: https://duckduckgo.com/feedback.html -- that's the best way we improve. Are you using a region setting?
--We do not use indirect results by default on our main site. Check out our privacy policy, specifically the section on search leakage: https://duckduckgo.com/privacy.html. On HTML5 browsers we can do an internal postMessage to strip the referrer header in-line. However, if you open in a new tab/window, we cannot do that. Nevertheless, you can turn this behavior off on the main site in the settings (under privacy): https://duckduckgo.com/settings.html. If you're using a modern Safari though, this shouldn't happen. Again, would love to figure this out.