Google alternative DuckDuckGo hit 3.1M queries yesterday, up 50% in 8 days as PRISM fears rise

[sofa king]

51. I remember when the #1 answer was always, "porno."

I remember when half of the top twenty answers to ANY query would be pornography websites. Eventually I moved to meta-search engines like Dogpile so that I could better wade through the porno swamp. Webcrawler's S&M cosplay jungle was always well represented in Dogpile.

I remember reading an article in Scientific American, before it jumped the shark, by the founders of Google, explaining how their search algorithms tested a website for authority by noting how many other sites cited them, which wound up temporarily excluding most of the porno sites from the top search results.

There were only a handful of search engines that made any impression on me. Before Google, the advanced queries of Northern Lights seemed like a miracle compared to Altavista, and Altavista's own Boolean modifiers were much superior to any of the other crap out there.

That damned spider showed me nothing but porn for second half of the 1990s. Mostly bad porn, too, because hell yes, I looked anyway!

Edit: By the way, Google averages five billion--with a B--search queries a day. DDG's popularity will have to increase by an order of magnitude in order to threaten to steal one percent of Google's volume.