Let me Duck Duck Go that for you
lmddgtfy.com
lmddgtfy.com
That said, I do love DDG, and it's still my primary search engine after 2 months as well. I switched based on the privacy policy (no personally identifiable information retained), ability to use HTTPS, and the nice infinite scrolling implementation, and unless these things change I'll certainly continue to use it. The combination of these, plus the generally impressive quality of the search results, make it really great.
Kinda solidifies the notion that you can compete on more than just the content of the search results list.
It'll take you to Google's results on Hacker News.
My only gripe I have is that it is slow. I have a pathetically slow connection and DDG is at least 3-4 times slower than Google.
Having said that, there are two things I noticed which I don't completely agree with.
1. The interface - the fonts, layout on the first page somehow is very unreadable. I am not sure what the motivation behind this is, but imho even a copy of hte exact google serp fonts/layout should have been good enough. The only way ddg will stand out from Google is the quality of data on your serp. There is very little incremental innovation possible from the layout that Google already has for listing a list of links and text, and it also doesnt seem to be your focus anyways.
2. I think the auto extension of search results is a bad interface choice. A pagination interface provides a clear anchoring and also for most people the first 10 results are more than enough - anything more and the information becomes too overwhelming. Again I dont think this provides any more value from the Google interface and is bad from a cognitive overload viewpoint.
Just my two cents. Best of luck on ddg.
Subjectively agree on point 2, I find it a little disorienting not to be anchored to a page in the result set.
DDG is my default searchbar site.
Subjectively and strongly disagree with 2. I love being able to just scroll down to the second page of results, it saves a few clicks and lets me scroll quickly through a bunch of results so I can quickly gauge the quality of the search terms.
1. Increase the contrast (could be lightness, saturation, size, or a combination of the those) between the link titles and preview text. Right now they are similar enough that when I scan the page, I see block, block, block... instead of link, link, link...(which is how I think it should read). If you look at Google or even Reddit, the links are bright enough that you can scan the link titles without noticing the preview text and/or meta info.
2. Increase the whitespace between each block to create more separation.
I think #1 is more important because link-scanning will still be a problem if you add whitespace or the dashed line. In my opinion, it's best to use spacing, alignment, and contrast to separate objects before adding new objects to act as seperators.
Wrt to spacing, there is actually quite a bit and I get a lot of complaints about there not being enough spacing, though I made a setting for that. I'll also revisit.
That being said, wrt to fonts and sizes, I wonder if you like any arrangement after tweaking the settings? http://duckduckgo.com/settings.html
On 2, I get way more positive feedback on this than negative, perhaps 10/1, though I do agree there are issues around the edges.
I often brush on the trackpad to get to the bottom of the page. If there isn't a bottom of the page, it just freaks me out. It makes me think something's broken. Maybe I'm just an outlier though ;)
I agree on 1, and I think that what works well for Google & co is the strong colors. Every hit starts with blue and ends with green. You don't have to pick the same colors, but I think that's what makes it easy for me to distinguish the results.
I also think that the results start way too long down. I want to see my top three results in, well, the top.
I do like the never-ending scroll, though!
I think it is harder nowadays to make a fame with a name like this.
Windows Live Search changed its name to something less serious to be more appealing to the public. I mean, really, Bing? How serious is that?
Ask.com is about the most sensibly-named search engine. I mean, what do you do with a search engine? You ask it things. That hasn't really helped them corner the market, exactly.
I am ranting. I should go to bed.
But I wonder if there are varying levels of non-seriousness.
Names like Google and Yahoo definitely aren't serious, but they also have a sort of generic quality. Not in a bad sense, I just mean they don't evoke a specific silly image in my head - at least not by themselves (when I think Yahoo, I see a big purple !, but that's by marketing design).
Duck Duck Go, though, doesn't have that same nebulous quality. There's something more concrete there, and more specific imagery that comes to mind. And I think that's why someone might react that way to the name and not to the names Google or Yahoo or Bing. It's less vague, and decidedly more Saturday morning cartoon.
Is that bad? I don't know, it doesn't necessarily bother me. But I understand why some people view it differently than the search engine names already out there.
Duck Duck Go comes off as the 50 yr old guy who yells "'Fo Shizzle!" and holds his hand out for a fist bump. It's something you'd expect from an older guy trying to pretend to be a 20something hacker. It thus comes off as insincere.
I think what New Coke proved though is that haters have an unduly large influence. New Coke kicked both original Coke and Pepsi's asses in blind taste tests. It's possibly bad to have something that has a love to hate ratio, even if a large one, rather than something people respect but don't care much about one way or the other.
My one quibble with DuckDuckGo is that it's 3 syllables, none of which roll together. Saying the word google is fast. Saying DuckDuckGo is way less fast.
But these names aren't created equal. "Duck" is a noun. There's a very definite, "meat-space" thing attached to that word. It's a whole lot harder to visualize a "Google" (a google of what?) than it is a duck. And what's a Bing?
I don't think there's any level of familiarity that will allow me to read Duck Duck Go and not see a duck. Again, is it a bad thing? I don't know. Maybe it's a good thing. But it is a thing, it's not just like the others.
I weep for the ducks. :(
Here, I'll invoke "Tara"
"The less confident you are, the more serious you have to act." - Tara Ploughman
bloip gibbit erdle jopple etc etc But rebranding does seem a big job to me.
It's amazingly motivating when you start seeing your startups name appearing as a verb on twitter searches :)
It's also not too difficult when you're small but gets more costly as time goes on. If DDG succeeds, the customer base it has now will be something like .00001% of it's users.
In the same way, I just type I'd 'fb' someone for 'facebook' someone.
It only rolls off the tongue because you're so use to it now. Same with other brand named that got verbed. Kleenex. Xerox., etc.
The seriousness of DDG is to make damn sure that when someone types in the word 'dog' or some other simple search test, that pointed, relevant results are returned. And for that DDG seems to be getting better at each day.
He's been very upfront about who he is (one man operation) with zero interests in storing personal tracking information (the antithesis of Google).
He is serious.
Before the advent of Twitter, pg would attribute quotes to Tara Ploughman when he wanted to write one-sentence essays. (Since the advent of Twitter, he curiously has stopped writing one-sentence essays.)
There are any number of ways to go to cater to specific search audiences. Start up multiple parallel DDG analogs of Google's Blackle <http://www.blackle.com>; site, for instance.
For the business folks, call it PinstripeSearch or PrivateSearch or something suitable for the target audience. Graft a different presentation with conservative fonts and typography and tweak the search index ratings for the audience, and off you go.
There are any number of audiences for specific searches.
Yeah, the indexes get huge.
But then you also get to cater to and advertise to specific audiences.
I actually like the sillyness of the name but I'm not that fond of the name/logo of Duck Duck Go. I think it reminds me too much of Aflac.
DDG FAQ: Q. How do you get your results?
A. From many sources, including DuckDuckBot, crowd-sourced sites, BOSS & Bing.
E.g., see http://developer.yahoo.com/search/boss/ ...
BOSS (Build your Own Search Service) is Yahoo!'s open search web services platform. Developers, start-ups, and large Internet companies can use BOSS to build and launch web-scale search products that utilize the entire Yahoo! Search index.
BOSS (Build your Own Search Service) is a truly open API with as few rules and limitations as possible. With BOSS, developers and start-ups now have the technology and infrastructure to build next generation search solutions that can compete head-to-head with the principals in the search industry.
Only one I've actually noticed ;)
Of course it is subjective, but it really should be better across a wide swatch of searches. I think it is most clear though on what is X searches. The information view (from the home page) goes even further on these type of searches and grabs topic summaries in real time.
Other areas where I think we do noticeably better on average are with names and long un-quoted searches (5+ words). Of course you can find counter-examples everywhere...
What I always suggest to people is to give it a week as your primary search engine. If you (or anyone) do/does, I'd really appreciate you getting back to me with your feedback.
* I like the zero-click info.
* Is disambiguation redundant? Can't you just infer from history and location? Or is this against your privacy policy?
The single most frustrating thing I find about search engines is iterating a non-trivial search. It doesn't seem like DDG has an edge against Google here. I long to see a search engine that makes it easy to send a question off to Quora, Vark etc.
Is it as simple as redirecting you to those sites, or do you mean manage the workflow, email you the results, etc.?
My ideal search-engine would be a cross between a traditional search-engine (machine) and a Q&A site (humans). If you were taking a lot of iterations to find your answer, you could simply expand the text-area to allow you to write out a human question.
So, short of DDG becoming also a Q&A site....yeah, dunno :P.
http://duckduckgo.com/?q=gwt+log+javadoc&v=
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=gwt+lo...
Which Google performs better at.
I wished some search engine would implement a 'context' search though, that would really make my day.
Trying to find something like 'go' by keyword search alone is really a problem, you always have to add a bunch of other keywords in the hope that that will narrow it down enough, if you could just filter out those contexts that you're not interested in after the first search is over that would be really neat.
Neat one, when did you roll that out, I completely missed that trick.
Congratulations!
& thanks !
To embarrass me further you could now say you rolled it out in 2006 ;)
Of course, back in the 90s Google knocked out my reasons to backoff to Altavista, one by one, adding boolean queries, and phrases, and of course adding a boondle of data. So I was eventually able to stop using Altavista.
For the last few months, DDG is my primary and I love it. I still use Google for:
* a few queries that DDG can't find anything for
* to find out what other people will see when they "google it"
* YouTube and maps.
YouTube will be hard to ditch because that's where the content is, although I suspect I can wean from maps if I actually try.
Unhandled Exception
An unhandled exception was thrown by the application.Although, yes a lot easier to remember your way.
throw an unhandled exception.
Seems like non-Latin character sets give it bad vibe.
By contrast, Wolfram Alpha is more like an arctic bush pilot. Or maybe that's Cuil?
I think you mean 'cpedia'.
Yay.
Seriously, if you are concerned that someone didn't make an appropriate search on Internet before asking for information, there are nicer ways to suggest that than that kind of sites.
You can tell about a great search engine without that kind of approach, in my opinion. Because if your intention is good, this way is hardly the best, I think. Most will use it like others used lmgtfy, or a more strict "RTFM", years ago: as a "search yourself noob" end of discussion.
And depending on context, some people really do need to be shown that they can type keywords into the search box like so in order to get results like these.
----
Server Error
The following error occurred:
[code=CACHE_FILL_OPEN_FILE] An internal error prevented the object from being sent to the client and cached. Try again later.
Please contact the administrator. \
----
http://techcrunch.com/2009/08/08/which-search-engine-do-you-...
In any case though, I'm happy to fix if you give me some specific examples to work with.
You, on the other hand , could offer the most helpfull ads.i'm thinking of something like showing the disruptive companies for a service your looking for.
for example , let's say you're looking for a divorce lawyer. one option to save a lot of money is using an expert system software to generate the required papers. most people don't know about this option, probably because real lawyers outbid them in the ad market.
So knowing about the expert system option is very useful.
Of course , you don't have to show only disruptive ads , but an ad combination that offer the best knowledge for the user.
Now , if there's a way to make this scalable across many product types, you have a very powerful feature, one that the big search engines would find very hard to imitate, because it would hurt their profits.