DuckDuckGo and Wolfram Alpha are now official partners

[epi0Bauqu]

Here is the Wolfram|Alpha announcement: http://blog.wolframalpha.com/2011/04/18/wolframalpha-and-duc...

[slay2k]

Awesome job. Ignore the haters.

[davidw]

Did you get to meet Mr Wolfram? Doesn't look like it from the vibe I get from that, but who knows.

[nosignal]

This is potentially really good news. I've always loved the concept of W|A but hated the implementation. While very good at answering specific queries, it's no good at incidental or exploratory knowledge discovery - it's kind of out of the way, a little on the slow side, but most importantly it doesn't link externally (or even internally). I get the vibe that the W|A crew have an excellent idea and are doing an excellent job, but don't really "get it" when it comes to everyday usability. As they admit in their subtitle, they've built an engine, not a whole machine.

On the other hand, usability is DDG's killer app as far as I'm concerned. The focus on ease of interpretation as well as interaction is really valuable.

Simply having W|A's answer on the same page as a bunch of direct links to alternative sources is valuable enough.

But if I get a bit excited, if the power of the vast knowledge & computational ability of W|A finds its human voice through DDG, it could start to bridge the gap between "search" and actual knowledge retrieval. It's one (good) thing to remove 1 click by showing a number relating to a simple query - it's another thing to remove 50 clicks and 45 minutes of research and assessment to establish the answer to a one-step-above-simple query.

What I'd love to see as a start is for W|A to provide facts & figures against results returned through DDG. Eg. Search the web for "most popular travel destinations in europe", and be able to summon demographics, exchange rates, even trip prices for each result.

[sinaiman]

Great news, my suggestion: ditch the "time calculated" info on Wolfram results.

I personally don't care that something was "Computed by Wolfram|Alpha at Mon Apr 18 2011 19:31:47 GMT-0400 (Eastern Daylight Time)"

Just "Computed by Wolfram|Alpha" would suffice

[asmosoinio]

Yes, or use a much lighter font on the WA timestamp, now it is too prominent.

As an example, try to parse this result for "fathers day 2011":

"Sunday, June 19, 2011 Computed by Wolfram|Alpha at Tue Apr 19 2011 08:31:06 GMT+0300 (FLE Daylight Time)""

[JoelMcCracken]

I care, if its old. The knowing the age of data is very valuable when judging its relevance.

[shasta]

It's important so that you can know exactly when it goes into the public domain

[ck2]

Haven't tried them in awhile - I must say the ui/results are much better than all my previous experiences - is it wrong that I really miss the estimated results at the top of searches?

Also, they need to disregard the Wolfram result when it's useless:

http://duckduckgo.com/?q=population+of+nyc+in+2020

[epi0Bauqu]

Thx -- will do.

[HannoverFiste]

Users of the up-and-coming search site DuckDuckGo know that the site is unique because it doesn’t track history, contains less spam, features a cute bow tie-wearing duck, and provides zero-click information that immediately pops up under the search box.

-- from Wolfram|Alpha announcement

Do not underestimate the bow tie-wearing duck feature. I'm sure Bing and Yahoo knockoffs are around the corner.

[katovatzschyn]

Is there a name for the Duck Duck Go duck?

If not, I find "Newton" would be rather apt.

[frossie]

Is there a need to name him/her? I find myself saying "I'll ask The Duck" as the equivalent of "I'll google it". I don't feel I need to get more personal than that :-)

[sskates]

That's pretty cool that you guys negotiated this and they were reasonable.

[epi0Bauqu]

They seem to generally take a very long-term view of things and are very reasonable.

[wcchandler]

Congrats! I remember when WolframAlpha tried getting DuckDuckGo's app off the app store for linking to them... Glad to see them playing nice, now.

[epi0Bauqu]

That wasn't us actually :) http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2271580

[suprgeek]

This is great news! I have just one request - please never sell out to Goog, Yahoo, or Bing. We need a clean independent alternative and DDG is it for me.

[cft]

If you look at the traffic stats for WolframAlpha, it has the highest rank in Nigeria: http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/wolframalpha.com

I find this interesting.

[aw3c2]

Third-party visitor statistics say nothing about the actual audience of a website.

[markbnine]

DuckDuckWolf?

[rguzman]

DuckWolfGo

[helwr]

very nice: http://duckduckgo.com/?q=x^2

[thebooktocome]

There goes my support for DuckDuckGo.

[eli]

Err.. why?