USV invests in Duck Duck Go
usv.com
usv.com
We expect nothing less than such respect & openness to congratulate competition from you.
My first thought as I read above comment was "you would ignore it" and then I see your one word response. :)
I've come to completely rely on Google suggest as I type search queries into my Chrome address bar.
I find that particularly when looking up API calls, I don't even need to execute a search, I just need to rely on the wisdom of what everyone else on the Internet is searching for.
Also, if just looking for the domain name for a company, you don't have to execute a search, just start typing the company name. That skips the whole results page, saving precious seconds hundreds of times per day.
I just tried switching to DDG and lasted all of 5 minutes because the lack of autocomplete.
There is a huge opportunity now more than ever to take over search.
The real goal of a search engine is to provide relevant results. Google has 100% lost site of this and this is where you and the rest of the players have an opportunity.
Make your results 100% unbiased. Google's results are littered with their own biased content coming from Places, Youtube, Google Books, etc.
No one wants to see that. Google has lost site of the user experience as they need to grow revenues. It will ultimately come as a cost to them.
Gabriel's been a patient bootstrapper for years and I doubt he'd raise capital on a whim. I'm sure he's got a solid plan for the money, which he doesn't have to make public.
What Gabriel has figured out and no one else has is how to build a search brand that people trust and are willing utilize. He seems to have a loyal core of users that come to his site without him paying on a per-search basis. Search quality, as perceived by the user, in as much about brand trust as it is about algorithmic quality. Too many companies focus on tech first and hope that the brand trust will come later (SearchMe, Blekko). Gabriel has actually invented a viable search business model. That's much more novel than his technology.
The interesting question is whether DuckDuckGo's organic user acquisition model can scale with additional resources. They put up one billboard in San Francisco and got a huge ROI -- will that work elsewhere?
Assuming Apple maintains its policy of only allowing the Big 3 (Google, Bing, Yahoo) as default search engines in iOS, anyone know a way to manually add custom search engines?
I know DDG has an app, but it's not an ideal solution for everyday use.
The dedicated app you've got is somewhat clunky, but it could be made a lot cooler if it was purposed not to "access DDG", but use DDG to "make research easier" or "look up that term". That would entail caching some of the results, maybe formatting a-la Readability, sorting them, bookmarking (with the help of a third-party service, e.g. Pinboard.in).
I have the app on the first home screen on all of my devices, but I don't use it all that often, because it is slow, because there's not much I can do with the results, and because it's totally useless without a solid uplink. Ideally, I would prefer it to keep the results of old searches and allow me to open them in other apps or review them later from another device, cf. nahodki.yandex.ru & google.com/history.
> Unfortunately, there isn't an easy solution for iOS that I know of without jailbreaking.
Is there really an easy solution with jailbreaking?
I know I will probably get downvoted for this, but here you have another glaring example why closed and locked systems are retarded and should be frowned upon by each and every sane man.
Also, "blocks basic functionality for absolutely no reason whatsoever" is not - or rather, should not - be in any definition of "just works".
"trade away freedom for meaningless and short-term convenience"
Is such a loaded sentence I don't even know where I am supposed to start. What, exactly, is the definition of "meaningless" here?
Customising your search engine beyond a choice of search providers that >95% of users use is not basic functionality. Not by any definition. Apple have demonstrated time and time again that they DO cater for the majority (whether the majority know what they want at the time or not).
Yes, Apple locks stuff down. If you don't like it, don't buy an Apple product. This is not a complex issue. If someone considers it a more valuable use of their time to have a device that works better but with fewer options, that is their choice. They are not insane.
Convenience means nothing without freedom.
> Customising your search engine beyond a choice of search providers that >95% of users use is not basic functionality.
Oh yes it is. Every sort of customization and configuration is basic functionality, and there is absolutely zero reason to deny it to the user. Worse, you (and many others) excuse this stupidity with some bullshit marketing mumbo jumbo that probably not even SJ himself believed, and I'm honestly sad to see how well it seems to have worked.
>If you don't like it, don't buy an Apple product.
This isn't about buying or not buying an Apple product. This isn't even about Apple specifically. This is about the atrocity that are closed systems, and the need for them to vanish into history and never come up again.
How would Google come to be what it is today, if the OS vendors of that era had out rightly blocked them?
They're not quite there, but I hope they manage it soon.
I have used DDG and found it to be amazing for some searches early on. I felt the same about Wolfram Alpha. Both still seem awesome in their own way, but I haven't been frustrated enough to switch from Google as my default search.
I will say that as I've done more development, I've added more of my own direct site searches to Firefox as keywords for sites like StackOverflow, Wikipedia, Youtube and the Rails API. Searching said sites becomes "ctrl-L, so/wp/yt/railsapi <search term>". If I ever see myself having to dev on separate machines, I'd learn the DDG keywords for API searches.
Google will sometimes substitute words for you, and say "did you mean X?". That's gently frustrating; I'm sure it's great for most people but not for me.
Worse, sometimes google will sub words and say "Search for X instead of Y".
Sometimes, and this is what really bugs me, is you'll include three or four words in the search term, and Google will silently drop one. I only find out when I open the URL, and having wasted a few minutes noodling around the document, I try to find my word using a ctrl F and I discover it's not there.
Here's an example (that appears to work now): (I'm fully aware that maybe I'm doing it wrong, and I welcome advice about best current practice for Google searching. (For example, did Google ever group words in brackets? When did they stop doing that?))
+("os x" OR "osx") +temperature +(console OR "command line")
When I was trying it the first page of results did not contain the word temperature - obviously very annoying.
What's interesting is that I pasted in your query and the first page had all but 2 results with temperature in it. Strange.
I do a lot of on the fly math in the search bar because of my job and Duck Duck Go just totally disrupts my work flow for that, so I ended up switching back to Google after the day was over.
For someone to really switch over from Google, the results cannot be as good as. Bing was as good as, and it hasn't really worked out so well for them. With as good as - there's no compelling reason to switch. It has to be substantially better, and I don't see it but I could be completely wrong. I'd be happy for someone to reply to this with example search terms where the results from DDG are far better than what Google provides.
I just performed a search on DDG and I can use my keyboard arrow keys in a sane manor again. So far, so good!
Very cool that this is the Philly area, hopefully he doesn't move elsewhere.
No plans to move. In fact, we're renting our first office in Paoli, PA (right off SEPTA/Amtrak) starting in Dec.
FYI. Google.com is really easy to type.
Update: Thanks for pointing out ddg.gg
It's no longer a polite suggestion, it's a necessity. If they want to take the next step, they will need to rebrand and now is the perfect time to do it.