DuckDuckGo Traffic Still Climbing Like Crazy

I have been using the DuckDuckGo search engine for some time now and have to say that I’m more than happy with the results it provides. For the majority of searches, it provides me with the information I need. And if it does not come up with a valuable result, I add !g to the search phrase to redirect the search to Google (see How To Improve Your DuckDuckGo Search Experience for additional tips and shortcuts).

I also noticed that the search engine was really starting to take off traffic wise, reaching one million direct searches per day regularly in February. And while that is nothing compared to Bing’s or Google’s search volume, it is still impressive.

DuckDuckGo in many regards is what Google was when the service started to offer its search engine to the public. Back when Google launched, it was all about improving search quality and improving search accessibility. With DuckDuckGo, it is about that, but also about privacy and simplicity. Google in recent years has added so much noise to the search engine, that it sometimes difficulty to spot the organic search results among the ads and Google products.

Privacy is not the only difference though, as the company behind the search engine has added other useful features to their search engine that improves the users search experience for many queries (like the information bar at the top).

When you look at DuckDuckGo’s traffic in March, you will notice that it has made another big jump since the end of February 2012. Direct search traffic has nearly doubled in a month’s time (from around 900k per month at the beginning of February to 1.6 million in March). If everything goes as planned, the site will see a 50% jump in direct search traffic in March, reaching 46.5 million direct search requests in that month.

That’s more than a double-up when compared to January’s 20 million direct search requests, and still impressive when compared to February’s 30 million requests.

If you have not tried out DuckDuckGo yet, I suggest you give it a try. While it is unlikely that it will ever be as popular as Google, it has the potential to snag away market share percentages from the search engine giant.

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About the Author:Martin Brinkmann is a journalist from Germany who founded Ghacks Technology News Back in 2005. He is passionate about all things tech and knows the Internet and computers like the back of his hand. You can follow Martin on Facebook or Twitter.Author: Martin Brinkmann, Friday March 9, 2012 -
Tags:search engine

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Where Did All The Megaupload Traffic Go To?

Megaupload was one of the most visited sites on the Internet before its take down earlier this month. No one up until now looked at the consequences of that takedown in regards to the traffic the site received. Did it just go *poof* or did users flock to other sites instead to do whatever they have been doing on Megaupload?

One way to find out is to look at Alexa’s comparison chart. Alexa computes a site’s global and local rank from data gathered by its toolbar and a number of additional sources. While not 100% accurate, it can give an indication of a site’s traffic performance over time.

Even better, you can key in up to four competitive sites to compare their performance with the selected site. When you do that for Megaupload, and the four sites ThePiratebay, Rapidshare, Mediafire and Filesonic, you come up with the following graph.

Megaupload was shut down on January 20, and you can see a big drop shortly thereafter (the blue line). The site stayed on a high level nevertheless. This is explained by users still clicking on links leading to the site. While these links return a 404 error, Alexa may still count the visits. It is likely that the site will slowly drop to 0 over the coming months.

You also see that Filesonic experienced a drop. This is because of the site’s announcement that they would block the site’s file sharing component.

The Piratebay on the other hand saw a huge increase in daily reach a few days after the takedown. The site went over the 1.5 daily reach mark in percent which it never crossed before in January. Mediafire saw a big jump in traffic as well during that same time. Rapidshare, another file hosting company saw a lighter increase.

This is no proof obviously, and traffic may have increased because of other reasons. It is however likely that Megaupload and Filesonic users simply moved on to use other services. And those are not only file hosting related, considering that The Piratebay’s traffic increased as well. What’s your take on the matter?

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Megaupload Captcha Auto Fill About the Author:Martin Brinkmann is a journalist from Germany who founded Ghacks Technology News Back in 2005. He is passionate about all things tech and knows the Internet and computers like the back of his hand. You can follow Martin on Facebook or Twitter.Author: Martin Brinkmann, Wednesday February 1, 2012 -
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Monitor Network Traffic With York

York at its core looks like yet another networking monitor that is using the WinPcap packet capture library. If you look closer though, you will notice that it makes some things more comfortable than other programs of its kind. Alternatives include the Open Source application Open Monitor, NetWorx or NirSofts’ Network Traffic View.

The program installs WinPcap during the setup process so that you can start using the program right away without having to worry about dependencies. When you first start York you will notice that it starts capturing packets right away. Unlike other programs that display everything in a single window, York divides information into multiple tabs.

Data is displayed in realtime, and removed from the listing again after a certain period of time. This basically means that you will always see the latest data right away without having to scroll around.

York divides traffic into five tabs:

Packets: Displays information about all packets, including the time, source and destination address, port and total packet size.Files: Keeps track of files that are downloaded to the computer.Passwords: Monitors passwords, usually in the form of cookies, that are written.Web Sessions: Lists all open web sessionsPictures: Displays image thumbnails of pictures that have been accessed during capturing.

Data is not logged into files by default. You can however open the program settings to select log files on your system that you want the data to be recorded into. The logging options are quite extensive, with options to log passwords, files and web sessions, and packets independently.

It is furthermore possible to switch the network adapter, enable sound notifications for events, or hidden mode which hides the program icon in the system tray. Advanced options include saving packets into a pcap trace file (for later analysis) or enabling a TCPdump filter to capture only specific packets.

The monitoring can be stopped and resumed at any time using the toolbar buttons in the main program window. The same options are also available on a right-click on the system tray icon.

York is compatible with all recent 32-bit and 64-bit editions of the Microsoft Windows operating system. It can be downloaded from the developer website.

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BlackBox Security Monitor, Monitor Computer Systems In A Network About the Author:Martin Brinkmann is a journalist from Germany who founded Ghacks Technology News Back in 2005. He is passionate about all things tech and knows the Internet and computers like the back of his hand. You can follow Martin on Facebook or Twitter.Author: Martin Brinkmann, Thursday January 19, 2012 -
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