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Spreading FUD about tracking search terms etc didn't seem to help DDG last time. I doubt this will have any effect either.

DDG: If you want to grow, don't keep attacking the big search engines with FUD that only a miniscule % of people care about.



The February DDG newsletter reported growth in January from 2.5m searches to 5m. I don't think DDG needs FUD to grow.


http://duckduckgo.com/traffic.html

Searches per day in Feb average = 197,687

Searches per day in May average = 205,759

FUD certainly won't grow DDG out of the extreme niche it's in.


That agrees with what I said. Unless you don't think that much growth in searches over such a short period is significant.

It's even more significant when you look at where it was a year ago. 1.2 million in April 2010, 5.9 million in April 2011, 6.3 last month, and already 3.8 a little over halfway through this month. This is significant when you consider the lack of marketing and that DDG is run by one person.


It's not significant. In the world of search engines, you need to be the #1 or #2 player to earn major revenue. People aren't gonna wanna waste any time/energy advertising on your platform if you're getting just a handful of searches per month for say... mp3 players or cellphones. DDG is just betting on an acquisition, but it's just a wrapper around the Yahoo BOSS API.


Nothing starts at #1. Expecting DDG to displace an oligopoly built over a decade and a half in a year or two of existence is asking too much of anyone.


DDG has been around for more than a year or two...




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