DuckDuckGo and Wolfram Alpha are now official partners | Hacker News Reader

DuckDuckGo and Wolfram Alpha are now official partners

gabrielweinberg.com

297 pointsadmp56 comments

Here is the Wolfram|Alpha announcement: http://blog.wolframalpha.com/2011/04/18/wolframalpha-and-duc...

Awesome job. Ignore the haters.

DDG has haters?

Scroll down. Or don't, your not really missing anything by skipping that thread.

There don't appear to be any DDG haters in the threads on this article. There are two people who seem to hate (or at least dislike) Stephen Wolfram, though.

(Disclaimers: I have showdead on, this is accurate as of 9:31 PM, GMT).

I read it as haters of the deal rather than haters of DDG. For example, thebooktocome made a comment saying that (s)he was done with DDG because of the deal. Sorry if it was confusing.

Did you get to meet Mr Wolfram? Doesn't look like it from the vibe I get from that, but who knows.

No, but I haven't been travelling due to the imminent birth of kid #2. The vibe is good!

Congrats!

I just met Stephen. Sharp guy :)

And he will tell you so.

Every opportunity he gets.

This is potentially really good news. I've always loved the concept of W|A but hated the implementation. While very good at answering specific queries, it's no good at incidental or exploratory knowledge discovery - it's kind of out of the way, a little on the slow side, but most importantly it doesn't link externally (or even internally). I get the vibe that the W|A crew have an excellent idea and are doing an excellent job, but don't really "get it" when it comes to everyday usability. As they admit in their subtitle, they've built an engine, not a whole machine.

On the other hand, usability is DDG's killer app as far as I'm concerned. The focus on ease of interpretation as well as interaction is really valuable.

Simply having W|A's answer on the same page as a bunch of direct links to alternative sources is valuable enough.

But if I get a bit excited, if the power of the vast knowledge & computational ability of W|A finds its human voice through DDG, it could start to bridge the gap between "search" and actual knowledge retrieval. It's one (good) thing to remove 1 click by showing a number relating to a simple query - it's another thing to remove 50 clicks and 45 minutes of research and assessment to establish the answer to a one-step-above-simple query.

What I'd love to see as a start is for W|A to provide facts & figures against results returned through DDG. Eg. Search the web for "most popular travel destinations in europe", and be able to summon demographics, exchange rates, even trip prices for each result.

Great news, my suggestion: ditch the "time calculated" info on Wolfram results.

I personally don't care that something was "Computed by Wolfram|Alpha at Mon Apr 18 2011 19:31:47 GMT-0400 (Eastern Daylight Time)"

Just "Computed by Wolfram|Alpha" would suffice

I care, if its old. The knowing the age of data is very valuable when judging its relevance.

Then, "Computed by Wolfram|Alpha two minutes ago" would suffice.

If someone printed it out they then wouldn't know what ago refers to. I will revisit the coloring and size though -- I think I could de-emphasize it a bit.

It's important so that you can know exactly when it goes into the public domain

Interesting, I hadn't considered that angle. Are all W|A results public domain?

I believe he means "so you know when it falls out of copyright".

Yes, or use a much lighter font on the WA timestamp, now it is too prominent.

As an example, try to parse this result for "fathers day 2011":

"Sunday, June 19, 2011 Computed by Wolfram|Alpha at Tue Apr 19 2011 08:31:06 GMT+0300 (FLE Daylight Time)""

An improvement is already live regarding this, it used to have the same font size and color for the result and the timestamp. However I would personally make the WA date/time even lighter;

http://duckduckgo.com/?q=fathers+day+2011

Looks like this now:

http://www.webpagescreenshot.info/img/70578-420201195614AM

Haven't tried them in awhile - I must say the ui/results are much better than all my previous experiences - is it wrong that I really miss the estimated results at the top of searches?

Also, they need to disregard the Wolfram result when it's useless:

http://duckduckgo.com/?q=population+of+nyc+in+2020

Thx -- will do.

Update: fixed.

The founder of the 3rd or 4th biggest English search engine responding to and fixing issues from a HN thread. Awesome. switches to DDG

That is major motivator for using DDG. If you find something wrong, just tweet it (or somehow convey it to Gabriel), and he be on top of it in no time.

Just wait till it gets bigger and he's unable to answer them

Agreed. My first search will be how to switch the default search engine in Safari...

If you go to the homepage and click on Add to Safari, you will see your options in a grey box in the upper left.

Users of the up-and-coming search site DuckDuckGo know that the site is unique because it doesn’t track history, contains less spam, features a cute bow tie-wearing duck, and provides zero-click information that immediately pops up under the search box.

-- from Wolfram|Alpha announcement

Do not underestimate the bow tie-wearing duck feature. I'm sure Bing and Yahoo knockoffs are around the corner.

Is there a name for the Duck Duck Go duck?

If not, I find "Newton" would be rather apt.

Is there a need to name him/her? I find myself saying "I'll ask The Duck" as the equivalent of "I'll google it". I don't feel I need to get more personal than that :-)

That's pretty cool that you guys negotiated this and they were reasonable.

They seem to generally take a very long-term view of things and are very reasonable.

Congrats! I remember when WolframAlpha tried getting DuckDuckGo's app off the app store for linking to them... Glad to see them playing nice, now.

That wasn't us actually :) http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2271580

This is great news! I have just one request - please never sell out to Goog, Yahoo, or Bing. We need a clean independent alternative and DDG is it for me.

If you look at the traffic stats for WolframAlpha, it has the highest rank in Nigeria: http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/wolframalpha.com

I find this interesting.

Third-party visitor statistics say nothing about the actual audience of a website.

DuckDuckWolf?

DuckWolfGo

very nice: http://duckduckgo.com/?q=x^2

There goes my support for DuckDuckGo.

Err.. why?

Have you met Stephen Wolfram? He makes Donald Trump look humble.

A major corporation with an arrogant CEO? Imagine that.

A major corporation with an arrogant CEO who received a Ph.D. in particle physics from the California Institute of Technology at age 20,joined the faculty there, and received one of the first MacArthur awards in 1981, at age 21. Lets cut him some slack for being awesome.

-- from wikipedia

He is, nonetheless, considered insufferably arrogant even by the standards of other geniuses (and CEOs).

Does any of this matter for his products? Naah. Mathematica and Alpha are good, and as for A New Kind Of Science... well, I doubt I'll ever bother to read enough of it to find out.

I spent two hours chatting with him at a conference recently. I did not experience any arrogance, insufferable or otherwise.

Have you ever talked to him?

maybe you should look into the time he was sued by all his employees. and i don't meant the rule 110 thing, which was pretty lame, i'm talking about the one where he created a shell company and signed over the key assets they had all created in order to make the employees equity worthless. yea, fraud.

I can't find anything about this. Link?

I'm not sure what the direct relationship between the arrogance of Stephen Wolfram has to do with Wolfram Research.

Wolfram is outspoken about his work on cellular automata, which a lot of people think is overblown, but his company's work stands on it's own- and it's quite good.

Who cares? Wolfram|Alpha is a pretty nice service (disappointing compared to the grandiose announcements, sure, but nice nonetheless) and even if it weren't, DDG wouldn't be negativly affected all that much.

Now, if W|A were to fund a genocidal maniac there would be a point to boycotting DDG – but for Wolfram being an asshole?

Why would the creator personality figure into your support of a service at all? If you only consumed the output of humble artists/inventors/writers/entrepreneurs, you'd live a fairly impoverished life.

(Is there a name for discounting a company/product based on the creator rather than its merits? Or is ad hominem sufficiently applicable here, as well?)

I was a talk by Stephen Wolfram at MIT in fall of 2010 about Wolfram Alpha. Never spoke to him personally. When Wolfram answered questions he was always direct and gave grounded answers -- not dreams.

More than once he had to remind people that a lot of the shortcomings they point out are not trivial. It's easy to see how someone could interpet him as egotistical for this. But Wolfram seemed much more focused on building a product now and making it better as you learn from customers.

Wolfram is not trying to make everyone happy. It seemed like is he is trying to build something he loves doing and see if others find it useful.

So what? I don't think being humble is a virtue.

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