That's awesome! I've been using the beta for a while and it's been much better than the old site.
A bunch of ideas/complains:
- It's awesome that you're showing me a nice map when I search for places/address, but let's be honest, I'll probably need to load it into an online map (OSM, MapQuest, Google Maps) to get directions. So a "open in map" button would be great (yes, I can copy/paste the address and !bang it, but it's not exactly a great experience)
- Sometimes I just want to search for images or videos. Yes, I can search "Images X" or "Videos X", but it's not nice. Also you get the minimized image/video box. I'd add two bangs, !i and !v (those right now alias to Google Images and Youtube, which have !gi and !yt anyway) to search for images/video and that will auto-open the images box.
- Auto-suggestions are neat, but please add an option to remove the "select-on-hover" behavior. It's really annoying to casually move the mouse and select something else.
That's mostly it, otherwise I'm really, really happy with DDG. Thanks, and I wonder what the future will reserve!
So the maps did work for you? I looked up a few places just to test it out and most of them were not found or not identified as places. I am living in New Hampshire, so perhaps they just haven't done much with NH addresses yet. I love duckduckgo and I am glad that they are making improvements but I currently can't use the map feature reliably.
Hey guys, if you're looking for an alternative search engine with a different flavor, we came up with a discovery search engine that allow you to preview results before getting there and overall an upgraded user experience. oh We're in the process of going https and we don't track your search as well;-)
Your feedback would be very helpful.
This way: http://www.psykoo.com
Thank you to everyone who provided feedback to us during our public beta period! Please keep the feedback coming so we can quickly iterate. We really do listen to it all.
I love this. I'm excited to share with friends. In fact I looked for a sharing button. Anyway, looks nice. It wouldn't scroll on my iPad and a button for Press at bottom right is cut off, but maybe those are known issues.
This is a really amazing direction in terms of design. Like most people probably, I've pretty much ignored DDG because it didn't seem to be doing anything more than Google already did, but this design is really interesting for going in a new direction.
The only thing that stands out to me as less useful than the equivalent Google search at this point is the hiearchy of the results. Google uses a link-like blue color for the titles of each result, which seems like a leftover from a past age of the web, but is actually useful for scan-ability because the text of the headers stands out.
Having an extra color for the headings lets you scan the page much more easily, which lets you get to the result you wanted faster. The downside is that since their brand color is red, it feels "best" to have the highlight color red. But then that has some negative emotional connotations. Tried green as well, but it didn't stand on it's own enough since there's so little green on the page.
Anyways, I've switched to DDG as my default and will try it out for a while again. I also love those favicons that show up next to the domain names.
This solution is preferable to changing colors in the settings screen if you regularly delete your cookies (and with it the custom colors) - just change your browser search engine shortcut.
I was trying to figure out what about DDG's results page made it so much harder for me to scan than Google, and this is definitely it. Just a bit more hierarchy makes the page so much easier to process.
Honestly, I don't care how clean or nice the page design is, until it can't give me good results. Here is an example:
The other day, I was searching for a Django core developer's contact. I knew his exact name was Baptiste Mispelon so I searched that directly.
On Google [1] after his Twitter and Github accounts, the first picture is correct, and I did not have to do anything else, the contact infos are there, his picture is there, great.
On DuckDuckGo [2] the picture is not even close, and the first couple of results are not as useful as on Google [1].
I think it is a mistake to concentrate on clean design on a search engine until the searching algorithm is not that good. AFAIK Google's page ranking algorithm is well known, when I were in university I even heard stories that a student (going on the same class as me) reproduced the algorithms only on his own!
TL;DR: I want to search relevant information with a search engine, not to look some nice webpage.
"I think it is a mistake to concentrate on clean design on a search engine until the searching algorithm is not that good. AFAIK Google's page ranking algorithm is well known, when I were in university I even heard stories that a student (going on the same class as me) reproduced the algorithms only on his own!"
Dude they're working on it. Modern search isn't as easy as having a college student implement a crawler with the pagerank algorithm, don't belittle the team like that.
> I think it is a mistake to concentrate on clean design on a search engine until the searching algorithm is not that good.
The team focusing on the design is, I'm sure, not the same team focusing on the search algorithm. I don't see any reason why the design team should stop improvements because of the search algorithm.
I get the same three top answers, the only difference being in what place they are. On Google it was Github/Twitter/LinkedIn while on DDG it was Twitter/LinkedIn/Github. No problems here.
Instead of putting a large box at the top of some search results with what you think I want, why not put it to the side (the way Google does) and make use of the large amount of waster whitespace. I have tonnes of horizontal space available, not much vertical.
I've been using DuckDuckGo as my primary search engine for almost three years.
It's improved fairly steadily in that time (as measured by how often I end up falling back to appending "!g" to my search), but this is the single biggest improvement I can remember in my time as a user.
Aside from the auto-complete (which is nice), it feels significantly faster, and it's also easier to parse visually.
I use <alt>d to select the text in my address bar. If I am on a duckduckgo search results page, it seems this keyboard combination is intercepted and I'm bounced off to one of the results (well, the 'd' on it's own does this too). I can also use <ctrl>l, but I've gotten use to using <alt>d.
[edit] I have bug reported this. They have a very good feedback system on their website.
I've never really bought into DDG, especially for its lack of features. It still can't match Google, but this is certainly a step in the right direction and gives me pause to think about using it at least once in a while now. Glad to see progress in search outside of Google for a change.
This post made me finally create an account here.
I do admit that personalized searches improve result quality a lot, at least for some topics. But after using DDG as my main search engine for about a year,
> especially for its lack of features
just sounds wrong. On the contrary, I tend to feel really helpless when using Google because of the lack of DDG bang syntax. For me, DDG is like my perfectly customized search engine with all the features I need - without actually customizing anything. This enables me to have the same, good search experience wherever I am (notebook, desktop PC, tablet, some else's machine...)
So to conclude this: Not relying on the search engine to guess your intention based on personalization takes some time to get used to, but for me it definitely payed off.
I've tried DuckDuckGo a couple times before. Today I decided to give it one day and see if I felt more comfortable with it. I was having a really hard time parsing the results so I did a search side by side in Google and DuckDuckGo. I looked at Google and thought "yeah, I know I want link #3" then I looked over to DuckDuckGo and saw that the same link was result #2 but I couldn't identify it as the page I wanted just by looking at the results page. Further analysis helped me to understand the process I use for parsing search results. It turns out that the most important part is the URL and I've trained myself to look for that in the format Google renders it (right after the link). When I realized that this was what I was actually looking for, it all became much easier.
> Today I decided to give it one day and see if I felt more comfortable with it.
I tried that myself several times, and never quite managed to do it. It only stuck when I forced myself to do it for an extended period, at which point I finally started being able to reliably differentiate between "good results" and "results that feel like Google". I found it disturbing to realize how much I had conflated those.
Small but surprisingly annoying thing about DDG: I have to hit TAB too many times to start cycling through search results, on google one TAB takes me to the first search result, on DDG it's an unintuitive series of links.
The fonts look messed up for me (Debian testing / Firefox 29.0.1). In some cases letter i has a shifted dot (see the word Wikipedia in the last search result in the image below):
This is due to patents. I blogged a solution some while ago, but since then removed my the entire blog, here is a raw paste of the original commit: https://gist.github.com/klrr/73ce6da0fb6947ed92a5
I tried DDG about six months ago and went back to Google, but I recently tried it again. The gap is closing fast. As of now it's my default search. Google still does a better job seemingly "understanding" queries sometimes, so occasionally I go over there, but I'd say I'm only doing that about 5% of the time.
One of my favorite things about DDG is that I do not have to worry about "search bubbles." I don't have to worry that DDG is profiling me and de-prioritizing results it doesn't "think" I would want to see. I know Google thinks search bubbles are a feature but I think they're a bug. I don't want some algorithm trying to reinforce cognitive biases for me so I don't experience the shock of a dissenting opinion. I've observed a few times that DDG seems to do a better job finding really obscure things, and I've wondered if this might somehow be related to profiling algorithms or lack thereof.
I also find the level of data mining Google (and Facebook) engage in to be creepy, invasive, and to hold a high potential for abuse. I'm certainly open to alternatives whose business model does not revolve around that kind of intrusive personal profiling. I'm aware that DDG does have an ad-and-analytics business model, but they seem to be taking the high road with it.
Prediction: "privacy is dead" will in the future be regarded as an idea that greatly harmed several multi-billion-dollar companies. I think it's firmly in the realm of utter crackpot nonsense, and anyone who thinks this is either hopelessly naive or delusional about the political, social, and economic realities of the world. A full-blown user revolt is underway.
The new design looks pretty slick. I really dig the bootstrappiness of it. I do, however, have a couple of nits. I couldn't figure out how to make the weather in centigrade, so I tried searching for this:
It came up with some interesting results. The images opened automatically for me (not sure why) and were a little off the mark. Ideally there would be a link to switch between Celsius and Fahrenheit, with maybe even a cookie to save your preference, although I don't know if that's very anti-DDG (does DDG store cookies for anything?).
Yahoo "solves" this by having you go to weather.yahoo.ca to default to metric. At any rate, given that 95.5% of the world's population uses metric, it'd be a nice feature.
I think I found a bug. I'm using the dark theme and customizing the colors. If I set my background color to #000001, all of my text will turn blue (#0202FF).
Also, setting the Header option to Off is the same as On With Scrolling. This is on ff29.
Other than that, I think I'm finally switching over to ddg.
Good design but disappointing that the search and Menu option disappear when the browser size is shrunk to tablet or mobile phone resolution. Not responsive.
I feel like this hasn't been really tested in Chrome on Windows. The gray, detail information on search results is pretty hard to get past. I kind of just give up using it halfway though, looks like it might be better on other browsers though.
You can change the default theme using the menu icon in the right hand corner. We have a couple of themes preset, you can try implementing your own color scheme by selecting the "Settings" option.
[+] [-] Spittie|12 years ago|reply
A bunch of ideas/complains:
- It's awesome that you're showing me a nice map when I search for places/address, but let's be honest, I'll probably need to load it into an online map (OSM, MapQuest, Google Maps) to get directions. So a "open in map" button would be great (yes, I can copy/paste the address and !bang it, but it's not exactly a great experience)
- Sometimes I just want to search for images or videos. Yes, I can search "Images X" or "Videos X", but it's not nice. Also you get the minimized image/video box. I'd add two bangs, !i and !v (those right now alias to Google Images and Youtube, which have !gi and !yt anyway) to search for images/video and that will auto-open the images box.
- Auto-suggestions are neat, but please add an option to remove the "select-on-hover" behavior. It's really annoying to casually move the mouse and select something else.
That's mostly it, otherwise I'm really, really happy with DDG. Thanks, and I wonder what the future will reserve!
[+] [-] blueblob|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] peutichat|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yegg|12 years ago|reply
Thank you to everyone who provided feedback to us during our public beta period! Please keep the feedback coming so we can quickly iterate. We really do listen to it all.
[+] [-] qntmfred|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] comex|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] themodelplumber|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shmerl|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] ianstormtaylor|12 years ago|reply
The only thing that stands out to me as less useful than the equivalent Google search at this point is the hiearchy of the results. Google uses a link-like blue color for the titles of each result, which seems like a leftover from a past age of the web, but is actually useful for scan-ability because the text of the headers stands out.
Compare the current DuckDuckGo... https://i.cloudup.com/vrwZgUkOty.png
...to Google... https://i.cloudup.com/eFCFEE5TYG.png
...to an adjusted version of DuckDuckGo... https://i.cloudup.com/jluIYZWtzz.png
Having an extra color for the headings lets you scan the page much more easily, which lets you get to the result you wanted faster. The downside is that since their brand color is red, it feels "best" to have the highlight color red. But then that has some negative emotional connotations. Tried green as well, but it didn't stand on it's own enough since there's so little green on the page.
Anyways, I've switched to DDG as my default and will try it out for a while again. I also love those favicons that show up next to the domain names.
[+] [-] Holbein|12 years ago|reply
Btw, you can make it your default today by playing with the ddg address parameters:
https://duckduckgo.com/?k9=%23b02900&q=melanie%20laurent
This solution is preferable to changing colors in the settings screen if you regularly delete your cookies (and with it the custom colors) - just change your browser search engine shortcut.
More info: https://duckduckgo.com/params
[+] [-] justizin|12 years ago|reply
Generally the primary feature is that DDG does _less_ than Google, insofar as tracking you around the internet.
[+] [-] rakoo|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cfqycwz|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Walkman|12 years ago|reply
The other day, I was searching for a Django core developer's contact. I knew his exact name was Baptiste Mispelon so I searched that directly.
On Google [1] after his Twitter and Github accounts, the first picture is correct, and I did not have to do anything else, the contact infos are there, his picture is there, great.
On DuckDuckGo [2] the picture is not even close, and the first couple of results are not as useful as on Google [1].
I think it is a mistake to concentrate on clean design on a search engine until the searching algorithm is not that good. AFAIK Google's page ranking algorithm is well known, when I were in university I even heard stories that a student (going on the same class as me) reproduced the algorithms only on his own!
TL;DR: I want to search relevant information with a search engine, not to look some nice webpage.
[1]: https://www.google.hu/search?q=Baptiste+Mispelon
[2]: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Baptiste+Mispelon
[+] [-] billmalarky|12 years ago|reply
Dude they're working on it. Modern search isn't as easy as having a college student implement a crawler with the pagerank algorithm, don't belittle the team like that.
[+] [-] citruspi|12 years ago|reply
(1) Ad for Christianity
(2) GitHub Profile
(3) Twitter Profile
When I search the same thing on DuckDuckGo, the first three results are:
(1) Twitter Profile
(2) LinkedIn Profile
(3) GitHub Profile
I definitely think that the first couple of results on DuckDuckGo are as useful as those produced by Google, if not more so.
[+] [-] pyronite|12 years ago|reply
The team focusing on the design is, I'm sure, not the same team focusing on the search algorithm. I don't see any reason why the design team should stop improvements because of the search algorithm.
[+] [-] sondr3|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nine_k|12 years ago|reply
Everything position seems relevant, and first 6 are good sources of personal contact info.
Not bad.
[+] [-] k-mcgrady|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chimeracoder|12 years ago|reply
It's improved fairly steadily in that time (as measured by how often I end up falling back to appending "!g" to my search), but this is the single biggest improvement I can remember in my time as a user.
Aside from the auto-complete (which is nice), it feels significantly faster, and it's also easier to parse visually.
I'm really excited about seeing DuckDuckGo evolve, and it seems more and more people are as well: https://duckduckgo.com/traffic.html
[+] [-] egfx|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Nanzikambe|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mike-cardwell|12 years ago|reply
[edit] I have bug reported this. They have a very good feedback system on their website.
[+] [-] james33|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kermitdance|12 years ago|reply
So to conclude this: Not relying on the search engine to guess your intention based on personalization takes some time to get used to, but for me it definitely payed off.
[+] [-] Arnor|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JoshTriplett|12 years ago|reply
I tried that myself several times, and never quite managed to do it. It only stuck when I forced myself to do it for an extended period, at which point I finally started being able to reliably differentiate between "good results" and "results that feel like Google". I found it disturbing to realize how much I had conflated those.
[+] [-] joosters|12 years ago|reply
(Edit: How odd; a reload caused the page to be displayed differently, with the images below the text and icons.)
[+] [-] edwintorok|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gejjaxxita|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] josteink|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shmerl|12 years ago|reply
https://i.imgur.com/SsicEFJ.png
The fonts come from here:
* https://duckduckgo.com/font/ProximaNova-Sbold-webfont.woff
* https://duckduckgo.com/font/ProximaNova-Reg-webfont.woff
[+] [-] klrr|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] api|12 years ago|reply
One of my favorite things about DDG is that I do not have to worry about "search bubbles." I don't have to worry that DDG is profiling me and de-prioritizing results it doesn't "think" I would want to see. I know Google thinks search bubbles are a feature but I think they're a bug. I don't want some algorithm trying to reinforce cognitive biases for me so I don't experience the shock of a dissenting opinion. I've observed a few times that DDG seems to do a better job finding really obscure things, and I've wondered if this might somehow be related to profiling algorithms or lack thereof.
I also find the level of data mining Google (and Facebook) engage in to be creepy, invasive, and to hold a high potential for abuse. I'm certainly open to alternatives whose business model does not revolve around that kind of intrusive personal profiling. I'm aware that DDG does have an ad-and-analytics business model, but they seem to be taking the high road with it.
Prediction: "privacy is dead" will in the future be regarded as an idea that greatly harmed several multi-billion-dollar companies. I think it's firmly in the realm of utter crackpot nonsense, and anyone who thinks this is either hopelessly naive or delusional about the political, social, and economic realities of the world. A full-blown user revolt is underway.
[+] [-] orrsella|12 years ago|reply
[1] http://imgur.com/3tBrS7h
[+] [-] jagtalon|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] malnourish|12 years ago|reply
Has Yandex ever had any privacy concerns? How did this partnership come about?
Why is DDG leveraging Yandex?
[+] [-] Patrick_Devine|12 years ago|reply
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=weather+palo+alto+in+centigrade
It came up with some interesting results. The images opened automatically for me (not sure why) and were a little off the mark. Ideally there would be a link to switch between Celsius and Fahrenheit, with maybe even a cookie to save your preference, although I don't know if that's very anti-DDG (does DDG store cookies for anything?). Yahoo "solves" this by having you go to weather.yahoo.ca to default to metric. At any rate, given that 95.5% of the world's population uses metric, it'd be a nice feature.
[+] [-] okbake|12 years ago|reply
Also, setting the Header option to Off is the same as On With Scrolling. This is on ff29.
Other than that, I think I'm finally switching over to ddg.
[+] [-] ankurpatel|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dvcc|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jaryd|12 years ago|reply