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Duck duck go!

duckduckgo.com

65 pointssetori8856 comments

Ok these 10 node branches are becoming a pain.

It sounds like this community has some fundamental issues with privacy at google et al and is willing to sacrifice some obvious perks to relieve that.

If google made it possible to do anonymous searches would google be the ideal solution? or is there something wrong with the paradigm such that alternative solutions give us a glimpse of something different and the ideal solution is really yet to be realized?

I've got to point out that your average old man user clicks on the ads and doesn't care about privacy (or doesn't know anyway.)

Privacy is one matter some people are deeply concerned about, especially when search terms can get you locked in prisons by governments - decent search results is another: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1209482

How did the advertising on Reddit go? Was it good value for money? Did it result in a good amount of traffic? Or was the main value in feedback from redditors?

Any insight would be really valuable :)

I thought it was very valuable, and I am currently writing it up in a blog post :). I was just waiting for the #s to settle. I'll post all of the exact numbers.

The short version is about 3c a click, low bounce rate, lots of feedback, users definitely sticked, and it probably helped me get on the front page of reddit the other day.

That's great - We'll really be looking forward to hearing more and seeing some numbers. Thanks in advance for being so open about it, so the rest of us can learn from you.

I thought he meant the AMAA thread, didn't realise you'd been using pay ads too.

If you want a multisite search engine, check out http://startbox.org/ -- something I hacked together a while back and still use as the start page.

Cool--any chance you'd add DDG?

That is not what I'd call a multisite search engine. It's a multisite search box submitting a query line to a button-selected SE.

I was expecting something like "blindsearch", http://blindsearch.fejus.com/?q=alicious&type=web .

I use DDG along with googlesharing (http://www.googlesharing.net) for when I need to use google.

This submission might end up dead, but at least it'll introduce this great search engine to some new users.

well I did notice the privacy policy - duck duck go does not store ip addresses - you can also search via https if you wish.

looks a lot like http://scroogle.org

https search. If google enable https then I would be happy with that, until then, duck duck go.

What an evil idea. Track Google searches from your corporate proxy and use some Google-trends-like analytics on these data. This would offer a glipse of your true corporate culture.

I currently get a fairly good glance at that from all the racist edits logged by Wikipedia as coming from behind my offices NAT firewall.

A bit surprising that this link was not here before... Unfortunately they still don't like my developer-specific queries.

I too was shocked, and am also quite shocked that this isn't shooting up with up votes. - Developer specific I would say this isn't developer specific at all - but it has very convenient !bang support for developers

It's been discussed quite a bit on HN: http://searchyc.com/duck+duck+go

Gabriel is an active user, see his comments and submissions here: http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=epi0Bauqu

> It's been discussed quite a bit on HN

That's exactly why I was surprised the main site hasn't been submitted so far. I've seen a lot of articles about it.

Thx. Any particular queries? I am dedicated to making a better search engine for programmers: http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/03/hack-hack-go.htm...

I gave duck duck go a chance for a while. While it was acceptable for most searches, on some searches, it just couldn't compare to Google. For example, try these queries on both:

usb /dev/sda missing

javascript determine font size

Your point is moot, you still havn't seen the beauty of DDG.

Firstly for your two queries DDG's results where acceptable, Google's was slightly better - but using this example isn't enough to shadow ddg killer feature.

Lets try something else:

Search Target = star shaped guitar

limitation.

- you may only type/search once (click/scroll as many times as you want).

- you may only use one word; that being "star".

Good luck with google. (im on page 23 in google and still getting star trek stuff)

You might argue; I could just type "star shaped guitar" into google and it does work, but try find the song named "asterisk" when you have forgotten the band named M83 and I hope you see my point.

The icing on the cake comes when you click on the star shaped guitar item in DDG and notice how it filters out non star shaped guitar results.

you need to adjust the way you search, get used to surfing categories to narrow down search, dont rely on this google profile, which thinks for you.

Does the FF toolbar allow HTTPS searches now? And is the "useless page blocker" optional?

No, but I'm going to do a whole new FF add-on.

You can get https search in Firefox by going to the https site and clicking 'Add to Firefox' at the bottom.

my default search engine

Same.

I am curious. What's the benefit?

just use it for a week and you will see the benefit (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1209384)

Two questions:

Are you an employee, investor, or other interested party?

Is there not one good benefit of this search engine that you can put in to words?

Just use it for a week, and you'll see. For many things, the results are better than Google. (And it's not just the results, but the way they're presented.)

My only relationship to duck duck go is as a user. nothing else. second question -> I know full well my words could have absolutely no effect in persuading you, as search is such a personal and habitual experience. So instead I resort to simply saying; use it for a week and let the site speak for itself. Pardon my deliberate canny dodge.

anyway after a bit of a rant here is what i consider the most powerful feature of ddg: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1209619

I actually did use it for a week but I'm back at Google. There wasn't enough draw to pull me away - though I'll try it again in a few weeks when the owner has had time to respond fully to the reddit feedback.

I think he's going to be a very wealthy man!

That doesn't make any sense. I'm asking to be persuaded. Obviously I'm looking for your words. Asking me to invest a week of my search traffic just because? That's more likely to have absolutely no effect in persuading me.

Remember, I simply posted the duck duck go site and said this is my default search engine, why persuade you?

Research yourself, can't be bothered well, so be it. Try it for a week don't like it ... so be it.

Good luck mate

The internet has too many trolls - not that you are a troll

>Is there not one good benefit of this search engine that you can put in to words?

It has a duck.

Just use it for a week.

That's not even an answer... For me it doesn't have any benefit (it hasn't got my google search profile), but I'm also interested in what benefit do you see in it. Even just because I'm curious...

DDG wins hands down with respect to privacy.

TBH, I don't want/need DDG's privacy. I'm working with VoIP - what I want to get when I look for "yate" is the softswitch, not the city. When I look for "asterisk", I want the pbx, not the page about "*". I'm ok with google knowing that - it's search profile works great for me.

I think we've got too many words with multiple meanings to accept the same results page for every person.

The word "asterisk" does indeed have different meanings that is why ddg uses this particular technique to disambiguate the query. Narrowing down the meaning is performed by the user's intelligence not machine intelligence. There on the first page one can see high level "asterisk" meanings including Asterisk PBX, one click away. Please note too that Asterisk the PBX is indeed top of the weblinks section.

Compare the usability to google search. Notice that a person searching for the song "Asterisk" by M83 can find it immediately on ddg. A google user would have to try different keyword combinations to eventually get the topic in question - say "what was the band's name again?" and you are off on a wild goose chase. In all honesty I would rather click that disambiguate menu than have to retype a whole bunch of search terms.

Secondly your "yate" query is in fact the first weblink result of ddg (http://yate.null.ro/pmwiki/), the other top bits help the user disambiguate the search as there are other meanings to the name Yate. A possible reason Yate the softswitch does not show up on the disambiguate menu, could be the same reason why Yate softswitch does not show up on a disambiguate menu in Wikipedia. If you create a well written wikipedia entry, I believe your softswitch would appear shortly in ddg disambiguate menu. It seems the only like to the Yate softswitch from wikipedia is this link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jingle_(protocol)

As an experiment, try find those little Yate towns with the keyword "Yate" and the song Asterisk by the band M83 with the keyword "asterisk" in google.

How about one more thing: search for Asterisk in ddg, click on the disambiguate link for asterisk and notice that the results filter out non Asterisk PBX results. Quite handy if you are an Asterisk PBX professional.

Humans can't disambiguate in the sea of words as effectively as machines do. There is just too much results you have to sift through, every time you want to look up some little detail.

That is exactly what Google does: display too many results for a human to sort through effectively, and that is why ddg flattens google.

Wikipedia is humans disambiguating words; ddg is an abstraction of Wikipedia.

This ddg setup is the power of humans disambiguating words into a tree structure, and the power of machines indexing and querying this tree structure on behalf of humans.

I believe wikipedia would do well in copying ddg interface.

Generally, finding information in well structured trees is faster than one modge podge long list - hence the perceived better results.

tree power mate, tree power.

"I believe wikipedia would do well in copying ddg interface."

Of all things dukgo has going for it the interface IMO is not one of them.

all search engines started with that level of privacy and they evolved from there for various legal, marketing and technical reasons. It would be interesting to look at DDG's privacy policy in 3 years and compare it with this thread.

DDG most certainly does not "win" with regards to privacy. No man or corporation can win without being tested, and DDG does not appear to have been tested. We'll see how they fare when it comes time to match what they've written on paper with their actions.

for one they block a lot of useless spam sites that show up in certain querys and i personally really like the zero click info!

Sorry, I should to be downvoted for my critical answer.

DDG saves me time and I like its privacy policy. And I do like the duck, as compared to google's logo or google chrome's "evil watching-you robot eye."

Pretty much everything described in DDG's about page, I find valuable.

Our about page is now dedicated to this quesiton: http://duckduckgo.com/about.html

Basically, I like the disambiguation pages and zero-click info panels. Granted, google usually has the wikipedia article for a given query in the top 5 results, but with ddg it's always right there at the top along with a paragraph of (usually relevant) the wikipedia article. I don't think it's necessarily a mind-blowing search engine (I don't know if that's even possible), but I tried it out a while back and haven't had any compelling reason to switch back to google (except for the occasional query). I've been using it for a week or two now.

There's no image search.

You can read about !image here: http://duckduckgo.com/bang.html

But, not Hacker News, so I'm flagging.

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