How DuckDuckGo is fighting an 800 lb gorilla (Video interview with Founder) | Hacker News Reader

How DuckDuckGo is fighting an 800 lb gorilla (Video interview with Founder)

thestartupfoundry.com

47 pointsg0atbutt14 comments

Am I the only one that fails to see a problem with Google search? I'm all for fighting the 800 lb gorilla. I love to support the little guys with big ideas, and I'm usually quick to realize and point out flaws with the incumbents.

But with Google, I have never had any issues. It does exactly what I need it to do, and it does it instantly. It gives me the results for what I meant to search for even if I typed my search completely wrong. In the matter of seconds I can learn about any topic that pops into my mind, no matter how ridiculous it may be. I can't even remember the last time I had to click that itty-bitty "2" at the bottom of Google's search results.

"The relevance of the articles have been declining"? Bullshit.

"Content farms"? Who cares. If they give me the answers I'm looking for, I'll gladly wander over to those content farms.

"Privacy" What?

Don't get me wrong. I live for the David and Goliath type stories, but I think these guys are going about it all wrong.

Agreed. I used ddg for a while just to try it out and to be honest I didn't see it improving my search experience at all and found some of its design quite distracting.

Highlight result on hover? Fixed header? Even the fonts throw me off. To each his own, I suppose.

Likewise, while I'm sure a better search engine could exist, what DDG etc. are doing doesn't differentiate enough for me to forcefully change my own habits. I've just been through my google web history and it seems I make around 50 (edit: seems I average around 50 a day for February http://i.imgur.com/u3E6k.jpg) searches via Google per day on a wide variety of topics, very few do I ever need anything other than the first or second returned result.

I wonder if anyone would be willing to build some sort of website where we can analyse our search habits and "discover" which search engine is best for us. Maybe we would replace our search engine with a new one, and that would aggregate results from multiple locations and we'd pick the most relevant to us and it would rank from there? I guess it would need to be more complex than that to produce anything meaningful, but I would love to see such a project. Alternatively something that we provide our historic searches to and it compares what we did select and where it ranks on each search engine, that could be interesting too -- I'm willing to provide all my own searches if anyone did want to do this.

Maybe a "new" search engine like DDG could pioneer this, build something that allows us to discover which search engine works for us... if these "new" search engines are so great, it should surely prove that we would get better results from them.

(I said "new" because they're not all new time wise, but they're small and relatively unknown)

Most complaints are not opposed to content farms as such in search results. My understanding of the issue is that it comes about when Google (and others) return the same data from multiple content farms (i.e., first result: farm 1 scrape of stackoverflow, second result: farm 2 scrape of stackoverflow, third result: farm 3 scrape of stackoverflow, fourth result: the original stackoverflow q &a). Prior to Google's recent algorithm changes, the first four or five results often had the exact same content, just being served from different domains with different framing content.

Again, the issue is not that content farms are incapable of answering your question. A major usability issue results when the first result happens to miss the target of your inquiry. Then selecting the next four duplicate results, also yields certain failure.

I often encountered the issue with very targeted technical searches, where a particular error message is key, and it seems that four or five sites have information that may be helpful. Good content farms manage to manipulate data in ways such that the resulting Google description is altered enough to appear distinct. Hence, I would look through three or four Google results, only getting more displeased by the repetition of unsatisfactory content.

Granted, if you don't encounter duplication, or if all of the content farms have the answer to your question, then there is no usability issue. I definitely encountered results that were not satisfactory, although I will also admit that the algorithm improvements have caused positive changes.

There was also the moral/ethical issue that rises when you see content farms displaying higher in the results than the original data provider (from which they scraped data). This doesn't effect the quality of the result, but it seems inappropriate to credit someone so prominently for automated cutting and pasting.

Privacy, as GW details, is predominantly a matter of personal opinion. If it is important to you, so be it; if not, that's fine too.

>Am I the only one that fails to see a problem with Google search?

I agree with you about google's spell check, relevance, and speed.

DDG's !bang search is a killer feature for me, though. I can type "!wikipedia topic" in the omnibar and it gets me to the exact page I'm looking for, without stopping at a middleman. The same feature makes google maps, images, videos, and youtube easier to use to with ddg as my default search than with google as my default search. I have been surprised by the amount of search traffic that I redirect to something other than a general web search now that it is convenient for me to do so.

Chrome:

Ctr+T | "wi" | <TAB> | Topic

Ctr+T | "the" | <TAB> | Torrent

Etc..

Thank you for that, I hadn't found that feature. It specifically isn't working for me with wikipedia or google maps, although it works beautifully for a couple other test cases.

Search once, and it'll be added for future use. Search more frequently and number of characters required to type preceding <tab> will reduce

Most browser support custom keywords for "search engines". For example in Opera you can rightclick any form field(?) and "create search". Enter a keyword like w for Wikipedia and from now on you can simply enter "w whatever" in the address bar. That way you truly have no middleman.

In Firefox this feature is called "keymarks" I think. Add a bookmark from a search result page, then edit it, replace the searched string with %s and add the keymark (letter or short string, same as with Opera).

""Privacy" What?"

Is it so hard to fathom that other people might have differing opinions on that point?

Depends on what you use it for. For me Google has gotten a lot worse over time. 2? It is not uncommon for me to click as far back as 5 or 6 before I find what I want or something that inspires me to write a more useful query.

I have a probably dumb question about search privacy, but what are the chances of Google actually screwing up/getting hacked, and spilling our search histories into the public (like AOL from a few years ago)?

DDG's search results are fine, but I like Google just a little bit more. Assuming I don't care about the government or Google's advertising algorithms, and I just don't want my private thoughts/questions spilling out into the public, does the risk make it worth using DDG?

Well, it's sort of a hard question to answer. But Google has been hacked in the past. http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/01/operation-aurora/

I think the creepier (and more likely) problem is an Evil Googler. http://gawker.com/#!5637234

Not that that is a problem that just Google has, but given that Gabriel really has no way at all to link two searches together, let alone build a profile, makes it attractive to me.

I also seem to be one of the few people who actually finds that DDG returns much better results. All the people I've talked to irl seem to think the opposite. Wonder if that is a placebo effect of sorts on my part ("DDG is one, pretty cool guy so of course it's better than giant corperation!") or what.

Gabriel is such an excellent speaker, I'm not sure why - something about him just makes you want to listen.

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