Duck Duck Go is starting to get coverage | Hacker News Reader

Duck Duck Go is starting to get coverage

techcrunch.com

96 pointsvaksel99 comments

Upon recommendation from users on HN, I replaced my Chrome default search engine with Duck Duck Go. I haven't looked back since. Results are excellent, the zero-click data is amazing, and the semantic analysis ("Java can mean different things. Which one? (Some meanings grouped into sections Animals, Computer science, Consumables, Entertainment, Geography, Plants, and Transportation.)") is incredible.

When I searched for my own name, immediately my official site, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and blog (among tens of other profiles) appeared. http://duckduckgo.com/?q=mark+bao&v=

This is the kind of chatter that should be going on when we're talking about a "Google killer"—Duck Duck Go is more of a decision engine than Bing claims to be. Amazing work, Gabriel!

giving it a go as my default chrome search engine too. nice work gabriel! i love the infinite scroll.

When I searched for my own name, immediately my official site, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and blog (among tens of other profiles) appeared.

When I searched for mine, 6 people and places (that aren't me) came up. I had to click a second time on "Try Web Links" and had two entries at #15 and #27. On Google I have 3 results in the top 10.

For a search that actually matters I did "ruby blog." Ruby Inside was #2 but junk results contaminated positions 1,3,4,5, and 6. In Google, all top 10 results are relevant and high quality. From what I can make out doing various searches, Google's "trick" has been to rank popular/high traffic sites higher, whereas DDG doesn't have the benefit of Google's DNS and Google Analytics data.. if DDG somehow weeded out the results with very poor Alexa (or better) scores, though, I suspect the results would be stronger.

Kudos to Gabriel for doing a top notch job though. DDG has a long way to go before I could use it instead of Google (who are too far ahead right now), but it's the best alternative I've seen for sure and competition is good.

Thanks. I appreciate the detailed feedback. Certainly some queries are better than others. Your name hit a disambiguation page, which currently gets treated completely differently than other names. I should merge these in some much more useful way, but I haven't done this yet.

The ruby blog results do suck. Sorry about that. Better blog results are currently in process.

You are solving a ridiculously difficult problem, so I don't want to seem like I'm ragging on you at all, but yeah.. on the disambiguation pages, I'd love to see the first set of Web links appear below regardless (a bit like how Google does with its new-style "Did you mean" results) - it just aids instant scannability.

Yeah, they will load automatically if you do the scroll wheel now or down arrow, but I agree I should just show them initially. Another issue is those Web links aren't triggering the name-detection code, which pulls out the social profiles and such.

Out of curiosity, do you like these ruby blog results any better: http://tmbg.duckduckgo.com/?q=ruby+blog (staging server) ?

I'm going to take the contrary. I switched to DDG for a few weeks, but since have switched back to google. DDG is fine with general things ("Java", "Vim tutorial", and so forth), but fails with the specific (programming errors, how to set up esoteric programs, etc).

So DDG could do the job for about 60-70% of the searches I would make, but it sometimes would just turn up absolutely nothing and just say "why not try google?" It was cool to see DDG admit they aren't perfect, but I started wondering (as it happened more) why I wasn't just using google anyway. So I switched back. Really, using DDG so much has made me appreciate google more for being able to really scry into the crannies of the internet and 5 year old forum posts for the answers that I need.

Thanks. This problem should start going away now. I just added Bing as a live backup, so if I find nothing through my various indexes/channels, it should back fill with a modified Bing call.

Why did you choose Bing?

Because I'm already using BOSS for some things and it will probably become Bing at some point. I'm open to others.

You would be surprised but the choie of SaaS search APIs is really small -- even if you are prepared to pay.

Yahoo BOSS (which probably will disappear when Yahoo pulls out of search) and Bing API, basically. I don't believe Ask has an API.

This is a current issue for projects I am working on

Ask does have an API. It's just not open to the public, but is accessible via private agreement.

I have to say, I'm really impressed by how accessible you are. I mentioned a problem on a Reddit thread a while back and you fixed it immediately as well. Keep doing what you're doing, and don't forget about the little guys when you get big :)

Hah, thx! I can't even begin to express how invaluable feedback has been. I of course want to respond quickly, but it also has the benefit of getting a larger conversation started.

I was quite surprised the other day when someone committing to one of my projects mentioned that they had contacted you about a !clojure search option that does syntax search "better".

As a developer, your accessibility is something I value in a product/project/service. Companies talk about being "agile", but all that means a lot of the time is that they respond with incremental improvement and encourage feedback, only to stonewall most of its momentum throughout the process.

Kudos again. Love your work.

This pretty much sums up my experience. I really really really want to use and love DDG but the results just aren't nearly as good as google, especially for specific phrase searching. I LOVE the not storing searches, simplicity etc. but I can't love the search yet.

I know running a mail server is probably a pain in the ass, but if the owner of DDG made it so people could have @duckduckgo.com or @cuiler.com or whatever he's using now I think that would help spread the engine immensely (that and making it better).

Why do you think adding mail would be such a boon? Just a forwarding address?

I think it helps solidify the brand. Makes it seem more like a services company that won't go away over night. Not a bad idea.

Hell, just offer an extremely tiny "DuckMail" beta with 8 users and never take it public -- it's the thought that counts IMO.

as he said, solidifying the brand. specifically: i get the feeling a lot of developers here want to be all knowing of the "cool new thing." many of them think thats DDG, and a DDG email address would be a badge they show off. I know for sure if I switched from my gmail address a TON of people would ask me why and what the hell DDG was.

Mail and calendaring and maps and web hosting and machine translation are all cool services, but they don't have a whole lot to do with being a good search engine.

I disagree. You can search DDG with !scala {}{}{}{}{syntax-laden thing}{}{}{}{} and get results. Google doesn't really have anything that compares to language-specific search functionality.

The 60-70% of things I don't find on DDG immediately, I don't find immediately on Google either. Creative queries win at the same rate on both sides of the equation IMO.

I use DDG as my default and won't be going back just out of principal. I think DDG has a fantastic search engine in the works that could rival Google's "relevant" ad-laden results within the next year and a half.

My only complaint? Color scheme and logo. It just seems IDK, sort of... McDonalds? Gabriel, can I change your logo, please? :)

Hah, you can have a go it, sure! I can't promise I'll use it though :). I love the Duck but am less psyched on the lettering.

I will add some themes though, so if you have any theme ideas I'm all ears. Actual CSS/color changes/suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

I liked trying it, but localization is an issue when considering switching default search engine. With localized settings zero-clic data is still in english and links to wikipedia are to the english one for example.

Thanks. Yeah, the other wikipedias have not been integrated yet. Do you think it would be better to just not show them at all for other localizations, or is english better than nothing?

I think it's definitely better than nothing!

I actually dislike the zero-click data. I think it's impressive from a technical standpoint, but ultimately it just gets in the way of my searches. When I'm searching, I already have a general idea of what I'm searching for, so the zero-click info isn't very useful, and also leaves less room on the page for search results.

To give a concrete example: I was following a discussion online about a show called Archer, and someone said it was basically Frisky Dingo except not as good. So when I do a search on DDG for Frisky Dingo, the zero-click results didn't do me any good. I already figured it was a cartoon show on Adult Swim, I wasn't interested in "American animated television series distributed by Madman Entertainment Category" or "More related topics", I wanted something more relevant. I have to wonder how often people click on any of the links in the zero-click box.

Edit: you called it a "decision engine", which is both accurate and why I don't like DDG as much as Google. I want a search engine that reads my mind. When I do a search for "django", I want the framework, I don't want films/musicians/etc. Google reads my mind and DDG doesn't.

Thanks for the feedback. I think it's very hit or miss for people. A lot of people really like the 0-click. Our results are different too, so it would be good to give people like you the option to get to them quicker. I'll explore a setting to turn off the 0-click.

I was just thinking about my "django" search results, and I thought about why the Django framework ranked so highly. The type of people that write about Django and link to sites covering Django, they could be the same sort of people who know SEO better than the site operator for a tribute page to a jazz musician. So that might not have been the best example.

That's exactly right. However, I should take into account the popularity of the different ones and put the most popular on top. This happens in a lot of cases, but not in this one, though doing so is on the list.

Because I've watched Gabriel think through his business here on HN, seeing him get recognition and having his work complimented makes feel pretty freakin' proud.

Thank you so much Andrew!

As a Philly and HN denizen, I'm doubly proud! So neat to see this happening.

Congrats Gabriel! Shouldn't be too long until the acquisition chatter starts, but maybe it's more fun to have your own search engine...

What about the unfounded rumours related to the Cupertino chaps building/buying a search engine? Duck Duck Go + a splash of brushed aluminium...

Might as well get the chatter started :P

I had this same idea awhile ago. Steve probably wants to jab the Google folks in the eye, and all the time there's this great search engine out there with a silly name....

I'm wondering what this is built upon. Someone mentioned Yahoo! BOSS, which if true would be scary because the lifespan of that product is unknown (given Yahoo's move to Bing search technology).

Anyone know the true skinny here?

It's a complicated mashup of my index/crawler, structured crawls/dumps from crowd-source sites, live vertical APIs, and highly modified BOSS (edited, re-ranked, merged, omitted, etc.). The BOSS piece already uses Bing as a backup and could easily use Ask as well.

I'm curious...how long did you spend making the first rev? Also, about how much have you had to invest in the infrastructure for web-scale searching? Are you crawling in the cloud?

About 6 months before I launched something, which was really a MVP, if that. I've invested in infrastructure, but not a ton. I crawl some from the cloud and some from my own machines.

Would you qualify it as a meta-search engine or as a search engine ?

I classify it as a search engine. I'm in to doing whatever produces the best results. I started with my own crawler before BOSS existed and then switched that piece to it (highly modified of course) to concentrate on where the marginal benefit lies. Techcrunch initially classified it as a "hybrid search engine," so maybe that is a better term?

How do you do the crawls without getting banned? Are you using like 80legs or AWS for from cloud crawling?

How have you found Bing VS BOSS.

I have to projects, one kind of a side project and one a main project that would benefit from BOSS integration but I am not confident the service will be around in 12 months.

I've not played with a Bing API. Thoughts?

Bing API is equally simple and response times seem similar, so at first glance they seem to be somewhat interchangeable. But I haven't uses Bing as extensively as BOSS yet.

I'd be really interested to know your thoughts as well when you get into it. So please keep me posted.

Gabriel, you might consider using your position to do things the big search engines can't do.

For example, one-click access to mp3s, pdfs, kindle books, movies, torrents, and the like for download.

That is one of the killer features that propelled Baidu to prominence in China, and of course it's how Youtube got sold for $1.6 billion.

Moreover as long as it's not hosted on your servers, it is a legal gray area.

Google has made Lala into a world-beater by putting it at the top for all kinds of music searches. If you went one step beyond and added a little code that would convert that audio stream into an mp3...or that would convert a Youtube link (with one click) into an mp4...that would be very interesting and useful.

That is basically a core piece of my strategy: http://duckduckgo.com/blog/what-google-cant-copy-easily.html

I hadn't considered that feature though. Don't you think the RIAA and MPAA would come after me in like 3 sec?

Facilitating the download of something that previously was only available for streaming? Probably. I think he's on to something, though. You can get away with quite a bit as a search engine if you're creative in the way you present the search results.

They don't move that quick. Took them a few years to come after me with an old "grey area" site of mine, and it was ranked in the Alexa 500 for quite some time, receiving 400-800k unique visitors per day.

Maybe I'm missing something, but at first glance "Cuiler" and "Cuilest" seem like pretty blatant trademark infringements of "Cuil."

Possibly there's a parody defense; I dunno.

(See generally http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trademark_infringement for an overview of how trademark infringement claims are analyzed, especially the "eight digits of likely confusion" test. The sophistication-of-the-purchaser factor might be significant here, but some courts also recognize what's been called "initial-interest confusion.")

Moreover, the Cuiler and Cuilest Web pages look _remarkably_ similar to the Cuil search page, and nothing like DDG's own search page. This makes me wonder about copyright infringement.

(Again, possibly there's a parody defense.)

If DDG didn't get a license from Cuil, perhaps Mr. Weinberg should anticipate getting a letter from Cuil's lawyers.

Is there something I'm not aware of that changes things?

(This isn't legal advice, etc., etc.)

Yes, it's meant to be and to be interpreted as a parody, i.e. fair use, etc. No cease and desist or lawsuit filed yet :). I did email them after the fact saying no hard feelings and hoped they continue the joke, but we'll see!

Congratulations. You have now reached the required seven mentions for me to develop curiosity. Duck Duck Go is now my default search engine - and so far I am liking it.

Though I can understand why you wouldn't, I would love a "try Google" link on every page instead of only those with few results. Every now and then I need it and it just takes a few too many keystrokes to switch..

Thanks for trying it out! I'll consider adding that link.

I just started seeing traffic from DDG in the past few weeks or so, cool = )

I've been using DuckDuckGo for a week or so, and it seems pretty good. I like their privacy terms, and it makes a change from using Google. Search results seem quite satisfactory, and there a few nice features which Google doesn't have, although I expect in time they will probably imitate.

Have you considered marketing yourself in China? You'll have a good year or two before being censored.

Considered it, but honestly have no idea how to approach it. Ideas appreciated!

Having lived in China for years, I am highly sceptical of any foriegner's chance at conquering the Chinese search engine market. (For multiple reasons, first because noone else knows Chinese like a native Chinese speaker, and second because from what I understand it is technically illegal for a foriegner to start an internet based buisness in China, so you could not even hire Chinese locals to help you.[Although there are supposed to be several ways around this, including opening your buisness in Hong Kong with a rep office in the mainland, or opening a consulting buisness in China that 'consults' your search engine and helps them run their China operations.)

However I would give you a much higher chance of conquering the English-speaking market in China (expats, edjucated Chinese, etc.) who are afraid that Google will suddenly be blocked from under them, or after Google does finally get blocked from under them.

Yes, this is pretty much why I haven't done anything. Is there anything in particular you can suggest for appealing to the English-speaking market in China?

There are a bunch of websites that are frequented by expats in various parts of China (like gokunming.com), so any kind of advertising, either through forum posts or traditional ads might get you some trafic. But apart from that I can not think of anything easily done to advertise to the English-speakers in China.

I think at this point if you were willing to hire 5 or 6 Chinese Twitter users to retweet lots of things in addition to advertisements to Duck Duck Go you could basically take over Chinese Twitter. Twitter is now the place of choice for Chinese semi-dissidents and the habitual use of the retweet function seems to provide them with plausible deniability.

Have you done anything like this before? Any idea how to go about finding these people. You can email me directly at yegg@alum.mit.edu.

Why would anyone use Duck Duck Go when you have Google? Someone break it down for me, please.

It's a work in progress, but the about page is dedicated to answering this question: http://duckduckgo.com/about.html

Those are some good reasons. I like the way disambiguation is done, however it's aesthetically annoying. It feels like I'm using a search engine made by Fisher Price. For me to switch from Google would require a cleaner interface.

I find the "infinite" scrolling kind of annoying. It's jumpy when it loads and it gives you no reference of where you are in the results (versus which page you're on with Google, for example).

You can disable it at http://duckduckgo.com/settings.html

(You can also change the fonts and font sizes and a few other things.)

It's the only infinite scroll implementation I've run into that I don't dislike, though. I don't find it jumpy at all.

Thanks, I've been seeing references to DuckDuckGo for the past few months, but I'm going to try using exclusively this for the next week and see how it works out :P

Duck Duck Go is all fine in English search queries but it is less impressive for languages other than English. If a word in the query happens to be a word in English, you get results in English scattered around.

Here's an example, I searched for "radio hören" which means listening radio in German:

http://duckduckgo.com/?q=radio+h%C3%B6ren&v=

The third result is in English. The search query has a trivial stop character in it, the umlaut o. It should be fairly straightforward to detect that this query is not in English.

Any plans for better l10n?

Yes, most definitely plans for this are on the list! It's a recurring piece of feedback.

One issue I have with DDG is that sometimes, when it Doesnt find what I'm looking for, I try to press command-l to go to the location bar to use sone other service. It seems DDG eats up this shortcut for something else, very annoying.

On Apple? I fixed this (I think) the other night. Can you verify?

Yes, seems to work fine now. Thanks!

Congratulations. Seriously. Go Duck Duck Go. I think this is a pretty good example of a guy taking his product along through iterations until it got good enough to garner some well-deserved coverage.

Just curious: why is the search engine called Duck Duck Go? Any reasons to the name?

Update: found on Wikipedia - Some reporters have called the Duck Duck Go name silly or inappropriate for a search engine. When questioned about the name, founder Gabriel Weinberg has explained, "really it just popped in my head one day and I just liked it. It is certainly influenced/derived from Duck Duck Goose, but other than that there is no relation, e.g. a metaphor." The company's FAQ says something similar

Duck Duck Go is a game we played in elementary school. It has to do with a bunch of kids sitting in a big circle, and one kid chasing another around it. I can delve more into the rules if you want ...

I don't know how this relates to the search engine though.

Where I went to school that was "duck duck goose".

Damn, I got the name wrong.

duck bing punch duck google punch and go!

I express total incomprehension.

I first read Bing as being, which made for a very confusing interpretation:

"duck being punch duck, google punch and go!"

(ah too bad I have to explain it - now it loses the snap)

One man taking on corps like Google, Microsoft.

Delivering a service which in many cases are better.

He is like a boxer, nimble and quick.

He can duck a Bing punch,

Duck a Google punch, and get the job done (go).

ah geez got some tight arses round here huh? a little bit of fun with a name, meh.

Speaking of names, I own doqdoq.com (read as: dokdok - it's the sound you make when you type in your keyboard) and I am open to ideas. Email me if interested. You have to admit, it "sounds" like DuckduckGo but easier to type. It would also make a really cool logo with the "d" and the "q" together.

Well done Gabriel. I'd love to read an article on how you created this, the problems you faced and your thoughts on the future of search.

I think it would be fascinating!

Linked articles, technical details and philosophy: http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/duck-duck-go/

For the record, this joke was the idea of Alexis Ohanian (kn0thing) of YC & reddit fame. I want to check with him first before outing him--hence the delay :).

Here's the joke: http://cuiler.com/

There's a bunch of easter eggs in there, e.g. search for cuil.

Clever. :)

Out of curiosity, how does duckduckgo make money? I _never_ see ads (a good thing, but I'd love for the service to continue, so hoping that you're making money somehow!)

Ads have been on and off, but subtle. There's an issue with the ad feed that I was using that caused me to turn it off for a while. I've been so busy I haven't fixed it, but I'll get to it soon :).

Yes, very clever! Is there any chance you would offer 2 or 3 different themes? I recognize that some users may like the look of the site but how about an option to select another theme for those of us who enjoy the quality of the search results but can't stand the range of colors and font style?

Duly noted. I've been adding lots of settings, and you can already change the font face & size: http://duckduckgo.com/settings.html

I'd definitely appreciate an option for a more traditional theme like Google's or Bing's. It would make it a lot easier to get used to.

Thanks. I think I will be adding some themes one of these days.

Ah just saw you're in Valley Forge.. I'm usually there every week or two.

Cool, you should join this YC meetup group I started: http://www.groupomatic.com/haqsm3vj

If I search for a location (i.e. Lafayetta, CA), it would be great to see a map and get a link to google maps. I find this to be one of Google's most useful features. Otherwise, I'm liking this thing :)

What was awesome is - when i searched for something and it did not yield many results. As the last link, it suggested try this search on google. that's just gr8

Let's hope it can withstand the onslaught of popularity.

Pro: TC covered it.

Con: MG Siegler covered it. As expected, devoid of depth.

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