I would [i]love[/i] to integrate DDG site search into my website(s) as an alternative to major search engines and to promote DDG. But as it stands, there's a few major problems with it that unfortunately keep me from doing just that. They are:
1) The site box disappears. I'm not sure why exactly, but after trying to use it on a WP site and a different site, the search box was not visible to users after being added to the site. No, I did not accidentally erase it, update, swap a file, etc. That seemed too unreliable for me and bad PR for DDG.
2) "Try Google, Yahoo, Bing, instead". I really dislike this in the search and just seems like bad PR. Seems to admit that DDG is not a serious alternative and I do not want to promote a search alternative that touts benefits of privacy etc., that is not a serious tool.
3) The rate at which DDG finds my topics does not seem quite fast enough. I could probably deal with this problem, but then I ask myself - "why sacrifice user accessibility to promote a service that just isn't up to par?"
4) DDG results cannot load inside a page of my own site. This is something else that I could live with, but again highlights the contrasts between DDG and the big boys, and by that I really only mean Google.
I'm not sure if others feel the same way or not, but would love to hear your own experiences and would love even more to see these issues corrected to encourage webmasters to introduce users to DDG search.
First, I wonder how DDG is doing during this whole Google Panda update that has been going on for the past couple months. Has it seen increased use/decreased use/same as usual? Google claims the update is a success and they have been receiving a lot of positive feedback. Others, particularly webmasters I've been listening to around the web, complain the Panda update returns worse search results than ever and they cheer on Bing or any other serious competitor.
I believe popularity among webmasters has a lot to do with Google's rise to such popularity and I'm wondering if DDG is doing anything in particular to court Webmasters during a time when so many are becoming disillusioned with the big G.
Is that something you wrote or can I find that somewhere on the internets and use it? Whatever it is, it seems to keep the page loading fast and only loads the additional results if a user chooses to go down that far and I like that. :)
I found DuckDuckGo after a read on WebMasterWorld. I like the privacy policy and at least the idea of good, alternative search engines to the other established brands. There's things I've found so far that I like about DDG and things that I think could use improvement.
One of those things is the sign-up process here on the forums. Way too many redirects that creates confusion and distrust along with the double emails - from Zoho and from the forum. The sign-in block also looks like a clone Google account.
One of the worst registration processes for a forum imo. Not sure if anyone else has the same opinion, but just my .02.