Why duckduck go search seems slower than google search on brave?

I switched to duckduck go search on brave instead of google search but I find that duckduck go searches slowly than google. Why is it so?

Maybe google has better servers? :smiley:

Google spends a tremendous amount of money and energy engineering for fast page loads. Since Google is not just search, but also YouTube, and countless other services, it accounts for a large amount of traffic, which costs your ISP a lot of money. To offset this, they very likely directly connect with Google, and also likely have Google servers hosted at your ISP, as a way to make Google faster for you (and cheaper for them).

If you use Chrome, Google tends to slip in experimental high performance connectivity, like the SPDY protocol, which few websites outside of Google supported.

By comparison, DDG is very, very tiny. Like 40 employees tiny. Your ISP is not going to be directly connected to DDG, nor will your ISP be hosting any DDG servers. Also, it’s important to note that DDG doesn’t actually have a search index… the value of DDG is privacy and value-adds. The actual search results are pulled from partner APIs like Bing, Yahoo, and Yandex. This means that when you do a DDG search, DDG doesn’t have the answer right there… instead, they will query other search engines for the data, while figuring out if any of the 1200 instant answers are relevant to your query (and potentially reaching out to them), then mix it all together and send the results to you.

DDG will always be slower than Google, it’s all about what feature set you value.

Edit -

There are several things that can contribute to this (let me be transparent here and says the I won’t test Google on my system, but I can provide some insight).

First, if you are using DDG’s Cloud solution for storing your settings you will likely notice some lag. Other parameters that might impact performance include Region and Language settings (default being the fastest).

I just did a test on DDG (desktop computer using the standard (js) version) and noticed a small amount of lag when the results were loading. I flushed my server’s cache and since then the page display has been noticeably quicker. It is also possible that having certain Instant Answers being loaded can add to the delay. You might want to test with IA’s disabled (temporarily) or even try the HTML version of DDG. (https://duckduckgo.com/html)

One last thing that I can think of is using the no popups version of DDG at https://start.duckduckgo.com

Let us know if any of these suggestions help.

6 Likes

Excellent response @Rishabh :fire:

1 Like

Excellent clarity provided. Thanks.