I like Duck Duck Go. Mostly because, there is someone out there who is courageous enough to give it a go, single-handedly, into the search engine market. So props to him, I can support someone like him.
Having said that. There can be too much of a good thing. I feel that HN is being used as an advertising platform to promote DDG, which in itself is not such a bad thing when there are major developments and exiting features and news about it once in a while. So can we try to go easy on this promotional bandwagon?
I would like to know what was the motivation for starting the project. I don't think it's necessarily a bad idea for David to tackle Goliath but there has to be a unique value proposition.
Based on the information I have found about the project the only area I can see this competing is in the user experience (scrolling results, encrypted search etc). Maybe someone who knows more about the project can enlighten us.
--More goodies; I've added a lot recently (color codes, regexp, more advanced math to wolfram alpha, today unicode); again, suggestions welcome: http://duckduckgo.com/goodies.html
I use !bangs a lot, but I wish they worked at the end of your search terms instead of just at the beginning.
I often don't think about the specifics of what I want until I've started typing, then I realize, "Oh, I actually want the wikipedia page of this." So I have to Ctrl-A to the beginning and type !w [space].
It's not a big hassle, but it'd be great if I could skip that step.
ddg is quite nice when you're searching in languages with a relatively simple morphology. For English, I'm not using google any more unless ddg tells me to do so :)
It is very easy to perform shallow parsing operations on English, because of its relatively simple morphology. However, for agglutinative languages like Turkish, (Finnish, Hungarian and Japanese are also in the same family) where stems can appear under too many forms to enumerate, basic shallow parsing algorithms would not produce as interesting search results.
My anecdotal experience with DDG in Turkish seems to go in line with that assumption. So, I think DDG has a lot room for improvement in processing languages with complex morphology.
==================
A famous illustrative Turkish word is:
uygarlaştıramadıklarımızdanmışsınızcasına
...which decomposes to suffixes as follows:
uygar+laş+tır+ama+dık+lar+ımız+dan+mış+sınız+casına
...and translates to english as follows:
behaving as if you(plural) are among those whom we could not cause to become civilized
I am current taking the search engine for a spin and it has made a great first impression. I particularly like that instead of paging the search results it displays the results on demand using ajax. I prefer this interface because with less effort I see more results. I've found that with Google I tend to not to move past the first page and by doing that I probably miss out on information that may have been useful to me.
I wonder if Google has ever considered a similar interface for their search results.
I tried to use DDG exclusively for a month. Unfortunately, I had to drop back to google to find a lot of info. I still use DDG sometimes but for the standard stuff I search for, it doesn't fully do it for me.
Google will not do that because it would cost them a fortune in missed ad impressions and clicks.
The big question is how Gabriel will scale DDG with the design decisions already made.
It's quite possible that DDG can get to profitability with the layout the way it is today, maybe not as profitable as google but I don't think that would matter much.
Making a step back in income is a lot harder than foregoing a certain amount of income from the start.
When I tried out DuckDuckGo about a year ago, I noticed it was really good for general queries, but always had to go back to Google when I searched for compiler error messages or other programming-related things. Because of this, I eventually slipped back into full-time Googleage, despite giving DDG a try for about a month and a half.
That's why I like the !g option. If for whatever reason DDG does not seem to "get" what I want (probably because of me being trained to "google it") I can easily search with Google while leaving DDG as default search. Granted, I'm using it as default only since about a week, but this is quite alright when considering that I came from 100% Google. My previous attempts ended very similar to yours..
When I first heard about DDG it was because of it's privacy. I couldn't care less for that.
Now, saying that it is good for programming questions made me set it as the default search engine without even testing.
Zero-click info is amazing for quick doc checks, the auto-extending page is sweet and actually displaying the page link and favicon is a lot more informative.
Two things though:
- It's slow. Maybe because I'm in South America, or the server is not that good, but speed is essential for a search engine.
I like DDG, but the last time I used it I had to fall back to Google to find an answer to my question. I was trying to find the date at which the central bank of Canada was going to make its next rate announcement. I knew it was June, used the most obvious keywords, but didn't find a good answer with DDG. With Google it was in the top 10.
Not a huge problem. It works most times when I use it. But it's not quite Google yet.
Both. Gabriel has disussed this before (I'm on my iPhone so no links sorry). But basically he does his own spodering and also uses yahoo boss and the bing api.
As a win32 programmer, I always try things like createwindowex and I expect to get msdn as it is the most informative page. I can get it on DDG (doesn't even, show up ). It's the first result on google, even if I mistype it like createwindowe or createwindoaexaze. But may be I'm a dinosaur.
[+] [-] pavs|16 years ago|reply
Having said that. There can be too much of a good thing. I feel that HN is being used as an advertising platform to promote DDG, which in itself is not such a bad thing when there are major developments and exiting features and news about it once in a while. So can we try to go easy on this promotional bandwagon?
[+] [-] jacquesm|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] silkodyssey|16 years ago|reply
Based on the information I have found about the project the only area I can see this competing is in the user experience (scrolling results, encrypted search etc). Maybe someone who knows more about the project can enlighten us.
[+] [-] epi0Bauqu|16 years ago|reply
Here's what's coming:
--Stack Overflow, man pages & programming documentation in 0-click.
--More programming !bangs; I've already added a bunch but would love more suggestions: http://duckduckgo.com/bang.html
--More goodies; I've added a lot recently (color codes, regexp, more advanced math to wolfram alpha, today unicode); again, suggestions welcome: http://duckduckgo.com/goodies.html
[+] [-] bouncingsoul|16 years ago|reply
I often don't think about the specifics of what I want until I've started typing, then I realize, "Oh, I actually want the wikipedia page of this." So I have to Ctrl-A to the beginning and type !w [space].
It's not a big hassle, but it'd be great if I could skip that step.
[+] [-] plq|16 years ago|reply
It is very easy to perform shallow parsing operations on English, because of its relatively simple morphology. However, for agglutinative languages like Turkish, (Finnish, Hungarian and Japanese are also in the same family) where stems can appear under too many forms to enumerate, basic shallow parsing algorithms would not produce as interesting search results.
My anecdotal experience with DDG in Turkish seems to go in line with that assumption. So, I think DDG has a lot room for improvement in processing languages with complex morphology.
==================
A famous illustrative Turkish word is: uygarlaştıramadıklarımızdanmışsınızcasına
...which decomposes to suffixes as follows: uygar+laş+tır+ama+dık+lar+ımız+dan+mış+sınız+casına
...and translates to english as follows: behaving as if you(plural) are among those whom we could not cause to become civilized
[+] [-] silkodyssey|16 years ago|reply
I wonder if Google has ever considered a similar interface for their search results.
[+] [-] spooneybarger|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jacquesm|16 years ago|reply
The big question is how Gabriel will scale DDG with the design decisions already made.
It's quite possible that DDG can get to profitability with the layout the way it is today, maybe not as profitable as google but I don't think that would matter much.
Making a step back in income is a lot harder than foregoing a certain amount of income from the start.
[+] [-] kristiandupont|16 years ago|reply
It's great, except it would slow down Firefox notably for me. I haven't tried out the Chrome version.
[+] [-] aneesh|16 years ago|reply
http://www.bing.com/images/search?q=san+francisco
[+] [-] cookiecaper|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] woodson|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] epi0Bauqu|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] techiferous|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zackattack|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BoppreH|16 years ago|reply
Now, saying that it is good for programming questions made me set it as the default search engine without even testing.
Zero-click info is amazing for quick doc checks, the auto-extending page is sweet and actually displaying the page link and favicon is a lot more informative.
Two things though:
- It's slow. Maybe because I'm in South America, or the server is not that good, but speed is essential for a search engine.
- Special characters are not always handled correctly. A* work perfectly, but the situation is inverted when it comes to "@". Google's results for @override (http://www.google.com/search?q=@override) are better than DDG's (http://duckduckgo.com/?q=@override).
[+] [-] epi0Bauqu|16 years ago|reply
Special character handling will be much better as I index programming documentation and Stack Overflow with the special characters.
[+] [-] MikeCapone|16 years ago|reply
Not a huge problem. It works most times when I use it. But it's not quite Google yet.
[+] [-] adrianwaj|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ErrantX|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ecaradec|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] epi0Bauqu|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bcl|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] steve19|16 years ago|reply
Well ... they are now