The 50 Best Websites of 2011 | Hacker News Reader

The 50 Best Websites of 2011

time.com

202 pointsiamelgringo99 comments

I'm sure Gabriel will pass by here at some point so I want to ask a question: do you find that going into an industry where you have absolutely no "first mover" advantage, where several others are already "doing it better" and where those you're competing against are so insanely "better resourced" than you daunting or comforting?

I guess what I'm trying to learn from you is what your mental state is like on a day to day basis: are you a long term thinker? Do you believe that you have many many years to solve the problem well and compete? Do you believe that DDG may die at any minute but you simply don't care? Do you know unequivocally that you can do this better than anyone and it's just a matter of sticking it out?

Yeah. So that's my question :)

I'm definitely "a long-term thinker." I've already been at it for over 3.5yr :).

However, I got into it out of pure interest with no original intention/particular belief that it would get this far. Now though, I believe we have an established long-term vision and are executing on it.

Nice to hear some long term thinking going on. We need to cultivate that!

So did Hipmunk:

http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,2...

...and AirBnB:

http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,2...

The Instapaper guy is a long-time HN contributor, as well:

http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,2...

The headline should really be changed to something neutral.

Do you have a blog? Why not do a blog post "A tribute to HNs own in Time Magazine's top 50 websites" or whatever and link through to it?

Because that would be spam.

Edit: voting me down for refusing to submit the same article to HN, linked through my own blog? Wow.

According to the guidelines:

"If you're submitting a link, put it in the url field. If you want to add initial commentary on the link, write a blog post about it and submit that instead."

I think a blog post along the lines of "Several regular HN members made it into Time Magazine's Top 50" in follow up to a single link to DDG making it in fits within the guidelines, but to each their own.

All I'm saying is that, this is obviously something that people were interested to know about, if you're complaining that coverage didn't extend to others you think are just as important, then write about it on your own blog and submit that

timr isn't the submitter of this story. He's a commenter.

PG was specifically referring to submitters, submitting links.

...so following your perception of that quote, you expect every relevant comment on HN to instead be submitted as a blog post?

i do not think it means what you think it means.

That's addressed to the Slashdot defectors who'd gotten used to every link being wrapped in a couple of sentences of clever commentary.

The spirit of that guideline is that a link should speak for it self. If it can't, don't submit it. If YOU want to say something, write a blog post.

Slashdot's wrapper commentary hasn't been clever in quite some time, unfortunately. I had a very low uid there, and witnessed the decline firsthand. Count me in as someone concerned about editorialized headlines at HN -- I really don't want to see it go the same direction as /.

Hey, Tim.

The headline should really be changed to something neutral.

YC startups already get tons of free press and PR by virtue that their investor controls HN. I thought it would be nice to highlight another founder's startup as well.

To explain, the original title of the post was "Duck Duck Go makes Time Magazine's top 50 sites of the year"

Personally, I feel that Gabriel contributes more to HN content and startup culture than the AirBnb, Hipmunk or Instapaper founders combined. And, that's not to detract at all from the great work those other startups have done.

The reason that I highlighted Duck Duck Go,and Gabriel, was because he in particular, has done something amazing: he's boot strapped a search engine essentially by himself to 8M unique searches a month.

He's also taken things like search privacy, and tithing revenues to Open Source projects, and brought them to the forefront of discussion. His blog also has a _ton of great content on it, especially his series on traction is amazing.

The original title got 10 votes in the first 5 minutes after I posted it. That Duck Duck Go doesn't get some of the kudos they have coming to them is disappointing.

</rant>

"Personally, I feel that Gabriel contributes more to HN content and startup culture than the AirBnb, Hipmunk or Instapaper founders combined."

...and you're obviously free to express your opinion in the thread. But it's never been fair game to editorialize the headlines on story submissions here. (And for what it's worth, I think it was a fairly classy move that the editor didn't change the link/headline to emphasize the YC companies.)

DDG and Gabriel pop up on the front page of HN on a regular basis. They get plenty of attention here without having to slight the other 49 websites in this list.

But it's never been fair game to editorialize the headlines on story submissions here.

I don't understand your comment about editorializing headlines. The process of editorializing is making changes after the copy has been submitted. And, that's what happened to both the headline and original url that I submitted.

I submitted a link to this url[1] via bookmarklet. I trimmed extra headline cruft, and clicked "submit". The community upvoted it to #1, after you posted your comment, an unknown mod changed/editorialized the headline to remove references to DDG, and changed the url to this[2], which is pretty crap content IMHO, that I would never submit. I don't get that.

I'll stop this meta discussion, because it's really not that productive and uninteresting.

ref:

[1] http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,2...

[2] http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/0,28757,2087815,0...

> The process of editorializing is making changes after the copy has been submitted.

No, it's not.

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/editorialize

"1. to set forth one's position or opinion on some subject in, or as if in, an editorial.

2. to inject personal interpretations or opinions into an otherwise factual account."

If anyone is wondering what he means, the title initially referred to 1 of the 50 sites.

One of my sites was also listed. TouchArcade: http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,2...

I was pretty psyched.

Congrats to DDG but wow Time has the worst navigation I've ever seen for a collection.

Where am I currently in that list? Where is the entire list? How do I start over? Go to the end? Why does it do full page reloads for every click?

Then you haven't seen many list features on major publications' websites. Not that there are many worse, just that this system is extremely common.

There is a tiny bit of logic behind the thinking that some users prefer lists this way (the less techy you are, the more likely you're not a particularly quick browser, so these don't slow you down much, and having them on seperate pages cuts it into bitesize chunks), but the main reason is simply advertising, page views equal banner impressions.

>>Time has the worst navigation I've ever seen for a collection //

It's pretty bad, I looked and saw "lists" at the bottom of the page but sadly it didn't link through to a list just the same page instead.

>page views equal banner impressions //

I wonder how this affects the sites ability to retain people, they're offering so many off-site links, every tiny bit of content has this big chunk next to it saying "please leave the site". For those that do make it through would any of them actually have been less likely to click through with less advertising on the pages?

What I'm saying is that it certainly is going to increase impressions but at what benefit to the advertiser and with what cost to the content host ...

In my experience, from a short-term business point of view (read: how most people think), you're looking for the balance that stops just short of being such bad UI that people actually decide not to use it; but getting almost that bad is just fine, if it drives up banner impressions.

Personally I prefer to stay clear of anything that's actually annoying to users; I mean annoying as in genuinely annoying, rather than just "people will complain". For example, road block adverts (like when an entire page is taken over with an advert saying "your content will load in x seconds") are genuinely annoying, a sponsored site skin is (unless it's implemented/designed badly) not, because while people might see it and mutter to themselves, it doesn't actually harm their use of the site at all, and it's not nearly annoying enough to make them leave the site.

Interestingly, on one of my company's websites (our entire business is based around advertising), we had discussed the possibility of doing things like this and decided against it, on the logic that even though we wouldn't directly drive away users, in the long run it might contribute to their not liking the site as much. However after various pieces of user feedback, we ended up doing just this for galleries that our journalists take at events, now each image loads a new page cleanly, (giving new banner impressions), and feedback since we made that change has matched the suggestions we had beforehand: our readers actually prefer it.

>> There is a tiny bit of logic behind the thinking that some users prefer lists this way ...

I thought it had more to do with ads. The more pages you load, the more ads Time (and similar sites) can display.

Just the links & titles : http://pastebin.com/HmtPif1c

Thanks! I was just going to ask for this. I hate multi pages and endless galleries.

Time could save us a lot of time by listing it in a single webpage. I just dislike this stale technique for getting pageviews.

Time is not one of the best publications, making this whole post odd. Their content is bad, and their format as you describe is annoying.

Why would we care? Why trust shitty publications to tell me things like what is the best stuff or who is the most important person this year - as if you could even measure it!

full list in single window http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/completelist/0,29...

Took me a while, but this is 2010's.

How many founders are able to boot strap a search engine to 8M monthly unique searches?

Gabe, Jordan, and recent hires...

Respect.

I made it to 1M so far.

Link to your site? :)

http://iconfinder.com

Why have I not heard about this before? This is awesome.

Thanks!

Funny enough i often do a e.g "!icon vine" search on DDG :-)

Wow, I just found this as well - this is fantastic. Great job!

Thank you all. For users of DDG - You can use the !icon to search Iconfinder directly.

We should do a tighter integration so when someone searches for icon x we show some in the 0-click box.

I have made a simple API you can use: http://www.iconfinder.com/tools/api

Congratulations! Iconfinder.com is a site I use about every other day it seems. I've introduced it to a handful of other people and everyone loves it.

Thanks for making such a great site!

Thanks a lot!

How many of you are using it as your default search engine? I am. I don't think it's as good as Google, but I think it's good enough, some things are useful, like the quick links, and at least the user interface is cleaner, there is no stupid auto-complete etc.

I've been using it as my default search engine for a couple of months now, and it's been great. The only thing I find myself missing from Google is image search.

What really makes DuckDuckGo so great is the bang syntax. Searching for '!foo bar' will automatically redirect you to another search engine for your search (e.g. '!cpan mechanize'). Here are a few I use frequently: !google - Google !images - Google Images !cpan - Perl CPAN !perldoc - The Perldocs

Duck Duck Go makes it so easy to search everything.

!google and !images also exist as !g and !i. Additionally, if you're concerned with privacy (as I assume you are, if you use DDG), then I can recommend !scroogle (or !s).

I did for a while and loved the bang searches like everyone else, but I missed the speed of Google searches -- so I eventually went back.

Yes, it's a relatively silly quibble, but that second or two more of loading feels pretty significant.

It's not silly at all, and we're working on that.

I do for now, but its match failures (especially on computers-related stuff) is making me consider switching back to google more every day. Match results really are much lower quality than on google.

> there is no stupid auto-complete

That's really something I don't care about, since I never search directly from the site, always from my browser.

Same here. I have it set as my primary search engine for months how but recently noticed that I am more often than not already add the !s or !g to get Google results instead when entering my terms in the address bar.

One of my biggest gripes is probably that it will only display one result per domain unless you restrict a search solely to that domain. And it often shows not the most relevant or logical result for a query for a website. I should make notes on that and send them in.

Please do send in specific examples -- we really do use them to make a lot of improvements.

When DDG fails, use !g followed by your query. It takes you straight to the Google results. Decent compromise while you wait for DDG to improve in certain areas (and it is improving).

> Decent compromise while you wait for DDG to improve in certain areas (and it is improving).

Since it mostly uses Y!S's results, which tend to suck compared to google's (for my searches anyway), I'm not sure it can improve much in that area, which is by far the one that pains me the most.

And if I'm going to use google 9 times out of 10, I can just remove the indirection.

I wouldn't say it's as bad as 9/10. They don't mostly use Y! results from what I've heard from Gabriel. They do their own crawling and ranking too, so I do expect results to improve. They can afford to be more liberal about banning spammy sites, which helps a lot.

0-click info and search ideas are really nice features. Another useful hashbang I use a lot is !a which searches amazon directly.

> I wouldn't say it's as bad as 9/10.

You say what you want, I say what I did.

> They can afford to be more liberal about banning spammy sites, which helps a lot.

It's cool, but I've not seen it helping much so far, since the base results suck ridding them of some of the crap don't improve them noticeably.

> 0-click info and search ideas are really nice features.

They're nice features when they display information I want. They generally don't.

> Another useful hashbang I use a lot is !a which searches amazon directly.

No. Just no. Firefox has been able to do that since 0.9 if not earlier, I'm sure other web browsers can handle that as well. I have no need whatsoever for the indirection through DDG. Here's how I search amazon: focus address bar, type "a somethingsomething", return.

I have! DuckDuckGo gives me fewer hits, but I am usually able to find what I'm looking for within the first few hits, which is great.

One observation is that the Duck is great for English language / international searches but not for other languages (such as Dutch) searches.

I have switched inside the Google Chrome bar and am able to access image searches by adding a "!images" inside the search or Google with a !g. Very little inconvenience there.

I do. What I like about it is the ability to use j, k (just like in Vim!) to navigate and that results are displayed on a single page. English searches are good enough to replace Google (at least for me), but I still use Google for other languages.

For a start-up competing with Google in the search space - DDG has made all the right moves. Excellent PR and some well deserved respect to my favorite Search Engine. Kudos...

Link directly to duck duck go page:

http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,2...

I love DDG but it seems to load more slowly then google (obviously, google takes 20 ms, DDG can take up to 5 seconds).

Yes, the search results load much slower than Google. Parts of the site load and then the remaining come one at at a time.

DDG is a handful of people, and it's boot strapped. Google makes Billions a year.

The full list all on one page, FWIW (yes it's on my own blog), http://alicious.com/times-50-best-websites-2011/.

I've heard a lot of about duckduckgo on here and on reddit. Are there actual compelling reasons to use this service over google? Is the only reason their privacy policy?

I saw a commenter on the linked site state that duckduckgo is great for programming, what does this mean?

The best reason for me is the quality. Between the disambiguation feature and the lack of spam and crappy sites, DDG is really good at finding what you want it to.

In some domains. Whenever I give it a go, as soon as I turn to work it fails me (work is math for me).

Would love to incorporate a lot more math stuff, as I suspect there are some great sources out there. If you are so inclined, please let us know about them or add them to this Wiki: https://github.com/duckduckgo/duckduckgo/wiki

Do some programming related searches on DDG and you'll see the difference. Google gives me a list of links, DDG gave me a function definition and description from a language manual... on the result page.

These are the things I use daily that I find the most useful:

Lots of nice zero-click goodies: * StackOverflow integration: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=remove+directory+symlink (can also search directly with !so) * IP Address: http://duckduckgo.com/?q=ip * Common symbol tables: http://duckduckgo.com/?q=ascii+table http://duckduckgo.com/?q=html+entities * Wolfram Alpha integration: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=d%28cos%28x^2%29%2F%28e^x%29%29+dx

Disambiguation (great for software with a common word/term as a name), e.g. homebrew: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=homebrew

Favicons in the results. This lets me easily focus in on the sites that I think will be most useful.

Direct search of many programming references with bang-syntax: * Ruby: http://duckduckgo.com/?q=!ruby+IO * JQuery: http://duckduckgo.com/?q=!jquery+fadeIn * Clojure: http://duckduckgo.com/?q=!clojure+deref

There are many more goodies I keep discovering (one nice surprise the other day was that searching for "Community" (a TV show) gave me the air date of the next episode). The best feature of DDG is the extensive integration with domain-specific information sources or search tools that often give me the information I'm looking for with no clicks at all.

[Requests formatting]

Yikes, sorry about that.

These are the things I use daily that I find the most useful:

Lots of nice zero-click goodies:

* StackOverflow integration: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=remove+directory+symlink (can also search directly with !so)

* IP Address: http://duckduckgo.com/?q=ip

* Common symbol tables: http://duckduckgo.com/?q=ascii+table http://duckduckgo.com/?q=html+entities

* Wolfram Alpha integration: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=d%28cos%28x^2%29%2F%28e^x%29%29+dx

Disambiguation (great for software with a common word/term as a name), e.g. homebrew: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=homebrew

Favicons in the results. This lets me easily focus in on the sites that I think will be most useful.

Direct search of many programming references with bang-syntax:

* Ruby: http://duckduckgo.com/?q=!ruby+IO

* JQuery: http://duckduckgo.com/?q=!jquery+fadeIn

* Clojure: http://duckduckgo.com/?q=!clojure+deref

Thanks :)

(And yeah, I understand that I could have done that myself and hence the downvote)

DearPhotograph.com is an amazing site, never seen it before

This one broke my heart for some reason:

http://dearphotograph.com/post/8311735731/dear-photograph-if...

Darya Pino's site (http://summertomato.com/) on there too.

I came across her site through Kevin Rose's introduction on G+.

Good PR. Congrats. :)

Bleacher Report (#11 on the list) is looking for Ruby people in San Francisco. Great opportunity to work for a high traffic site and a fun company:

http://bleacherreport.com/careers/engineering

As much as this is obnoxious, pageview link-bait, they do have some smart calls. In addition to the YC crowd, Marco, DuckDuckGo, etc. I think they really highlighted some great blogs, including This is my Next, among others.

Time.com is certainly not one of the best, given the terrible user experience they have created with this list in order to maximise page views...!

Would any of the founders reading this care to post about the traffic bump the Time story brought?

Time.com is not featuring on that list any time soon. </minirant>

Great work DDG and yegg! I love DDG and have been using it for well over a year. The quality is just so good that anytime I get on computer set to search Google by default, I only get through a few searches before I'm compelled to head over to DDG.

Thanks to the SF billboards, non-nerdy people have noticed it.

Nothing but respect for Gabriel!

Way to go!

Eh. Weird. Congratulating Gabriel got me -4 votes? Sometimes I just don't know HN anymore.

So did 49 other sites.

140 million sites didn't make the list. [1]

1: http://news.netcraft.com/

And what's more, a site which for the most part remained a one-man show taking on one of the most difficult to penetrate markets and actually suceeding in surviving, getting noticed and loved. If that's not an achievement, I don't know what is.

Why do you think the search engine market is so hard to penetrate?

Firstly it requires a decent amount of initial work and investment. While DDG does use the BOSS API, its still a lot of work to get it working right especially since DDG integrates not just that but other engines too.

A search engine starting from scratch is a huge task, which is not made easier with the brand recognition the big guys get. Since search is such a fundamental concept to the use of the web, many people think of it as a start point to the internet. This is where its hard to get early adopters because only people specially interested in new SE's would try the new kid, everyone else uses the comforting familiarity of Google.

And lastly, the leaders in the search space are some really big names. Names which have gone onto become verbs. To go head on against such competition is commendable if you're not in the vertical market. What is even tougher when the media calls you a *-killer and in the initial days you can't live upto the false hype that is created (see Cuil).

So didn't millions more.

You're obviously getting downvoted, so I probably will too, but I have to somewhat agree. But more specifically, why duckduckgo? Are they better than the other 49? Why is this submission rated number 1 on hn? I really don't get it.... One of 50 on a list?

I work at one of the other 49, and didn't feel the need to submit when the list came out many many hours ago....

So, I guess I agree with the sentiment you express. Why duckduckgo in this situation? Maybe I'm honestly missing something

From my perspective it's incredibly rare for a search engine to rival Google in a. the quality of the results and b. it's features.

DuckDuckGo generally has very good results and it's features (Privacy, Bang, etc.) and the like are good.

I can see from your comment that you honestly don't understand why DDG is the #1 post on HN right now, so I'll answer it honestly.

You don't say which company you work for in this comment.

You don't use your real name in your HN profile.

You're not giving us a way to connect and root for you.

If you were more open. If you openly talked about your company and taught us what you learned, you'd give us a way to feel connected to you and your company. Then we'd probably all root for you too.

Give us a chance to get to know you and relate to you.

I appreciate the comment - and now much better appreciate popularity of the submission. Build a respect for your company and the support will follow.

Also, my username is my abbreviated real name, and pretty transparent. However, I do also have a company social posting policy I must follow...

I look forward for the one day in the future to talk about my own startup with you Andrew.

Thank you for the insight.

Email me any time. I met Sivers from a comment on HN. He ended up doing an interview and becoming a friend.

> You're obviously getting downvoted, so I probably will too

Why the groupthink?

Yeah, why duckduckgo was what I meant to ask. Now, other commenters have pointed out that the founder has been with HN since the beginning, and they want to recognize his achievement. Great! Not sure why I'm getting downvoted for pointing this out though. I just thought a title like "Top 50 websites of 2011 on Time (includes DuckDuckGo!)", and a link to the top of the story might have been more relevant.

What you're seeing is pride that one of us is doing well. yegg, the founder, has been on HN from the beginning.

We've watching him single-handedly go up against Google. He's helped a bunch of us in private. We're rooting for him and we're glad to see him get recognized.

That is awesome, and now I know that (I honestly did not before). But it's weird to get downvoted for merely asking why DuckDuckGo was special in this story.

>But it's weird to get downvoted for merely asking why DuckDuckGo was special in this story.

But you didn't ask.

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