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DuckDuckGo is growing

gabrielweinberg.com

147 pointsjeffmiller55 comments

Congratulations Gabriel. DDG is invaluable for those of us who do not want our searches logged into a database, who do not want search results sorted by whether or not an acquaintance has "liked" a page. I wear my DDG t-shirt out and have been asked about it a couple of times. I wear it happily.

For what it's worth, I've seen absolutely no indication that Google takes social data into account when ranking results. They only show it as metadata on items within the original ordering.

Actually I saw an example of this twice earlier today. I did a search for some relatively common terms ("api debug" or something like that) and a friend's companies API came up on the first page. Hopped into incognito mode, was not to be found in the first several pages. Same thing happened not too long after, a friend's blog came up for a term, tried incognito, it was gone.

That could just be personalization (as opposed to social graph leverage).

Personally, I don't think social graph leverage is bad though.

I tried switching to DDG, but found that I was really missing Google's date range filter. Especially for troubleshooting searches where you can get results that are relevant to the search terms but have obsolete old content, I almost always hit "past year" or even "past month". I know about the sort by date feature in DDG, but I really want date as a filter on the whole result set, with a sort by relevance within the filtered results.

Agree 100%. I use the "past year" or "past month" at least once a day. No date ranges to fiddle with, no new page to have to go to to enter a date range .... just click the link and the results appear in a second. DDG would be awesome with this.

I support that ! This is the feature I miss the most in DDG. Most of my searches during the day relate to tech stuff, and recent content is one of the most relevant criteria (usually, I filter to get the result from the last 12 months).

Thx! This is something we've wanted to do, but don't have great data for yet. If you use the sort by date feature (for timely pages) there is a date displayed. You can get to that by selecting it in the drop down next to the search box or by typing sort:date or just s:d at the end of the query.

You can also quickly get to the google ranges (when needed) via our !bang syntax: http://duckduckgo.com/bang.html - e.g. just add !gyear !gmonth etc to the end of your query.

Weirdly, I want a time filter, but to block recent results and promote results older than X years.

I can think of the example, but there was something with few results for (about) 12 years ago (and those were the ones I wanted) but millions for this year. (And I didn't want those.)

The !bang syntax is definitely one of DDG's best features. Being able to access a few hundred site searches with a keyword is incredibly powerful, and saves time on creating quick searches in Firefox.

(The full list of !bang commands http://duckduckgo.com/bang.html)

I disagree. It belongs in the browser.

Also, Opera has had it for years (right-click any form field and choose "Create Search" - no plugins or options screens needed)

Definitely agree. I set DDG as Firefox' default search engine (about:config --> keyword.URL) and it has come to the point that searching with the dedicated search bar has begun feeling clunky. I think there are no important sites which I frequent that aren't included in the huge amount of bangs yet. Could just as well get rid of the search bar altogether...

Did it mess any other programmers up, thinking "NOT youtube"? Don't search youtube, search the rest of the web...

Being used to Google, I would first try “-site:youtube.com .”

What I like is no zooming car ads blocking content like on Yahoo or the unhelpful auto-entry and auto-guessing features that gets in my way like on Google (e.g. searching for what Google thinks I meant instead of what I actually typed, did Google buy Microsoft Bob and Office Assistant Clippy?)

It's particularly annoying when Google substitutes words without telling you. Or when they silently drop words and you only realise when a ctrl-F through the web-page says nothing found.

That's what the "+" before a search term is for: this is exactly the word I'm looking for, and every result must have this. Otherwise it tries to find the most relavant page that's closest to what you typed. It makes sense to have that by default: do you really want to miss the exact page you were searching for because you used the term "graduate" instead of "graduating"?

Pretty much, yes.

Or you could do any number of things to communicate that there are more results using an alternate spelling. But please don't silently drop search terms I explicitly typed into the search bar.

+ing terms is a nuisance & usually has to be done after you've searched and missed "the exact page you were searching for". Maybe I'm in the minority but I find this awkward compared to Google search of old.

Oh I completely agree, there should definitely be some indication or link to process the search exactly as typed from the results page (or a user preference to make one the default). That's how spelling suggestions work, so there's already precedence for it.

If you want graduate instead of graduating you don't use + you use "graduate".

See how annoying it is? They change this stuff.

Also, like I said - default behaviour is great for most people. I dislike it. I don't want Google subbing words for me, and I don't want to enclose everything in quotes.

Gabriel is taking on a challenge that extends beyond Google's reach, the filter bubble. Luckily he's been able to implement several human curation strategies to make a better search engine based on reliable search results. On the flip side, Google has been fostering a limiting perspective on the world's information due to their personal relevance algorithms which drive more ad clicks.

I was always impressed with the speed of response by the ddg team. I'd report an issue, and within minutes (sometimes seconds) I'd have a reply from the ddg team. Broken queries were fixed in days, sometimes hours.

I can support this. Even trivialities like a (slightly) miss-categorized !bang got fixed in hours.

I think its a good move. In my opinion you can only play the one-man-band card for a while and then you need to come up with other reasons why press should write about you. DDG has innovated quickly and been able to address user's needs at the right time when they were discussed in the press, picking up the loyal users on the way...

Thanks for building and growing DDG! Have been using it for awhile now as my default search engine and I love it.

I love all of DDG, except its speed (might be latency, I'm in Europe)

Thx! We should be getting some European servers in the short-term. We just added some in Singapore, and Europe is next.

Happy to hear that!

I quite like DDG but from my region (NZ) it's just too slow compared to Google. I look forward to when you're big enough to have datacentres in Auckland or even Sydney.

We just added some servers in singapore that should have speeded us up for your region. Have you tried it recently (last couple of weeks). If it is still slow would love to continue debugging at http://duckduckgo.com/feedback.html

I go to "goodies" and "zero click info sources". I see this line:-

Language SE - quint in quintessential

So I clicky the link, but it appears to have nothing to do with Stack Exchange. Some of the others work - Numote Big Bang Schedule has a nice box at top of the search results.

ALSO: Do you have a printable cheat sheet for all the bang syntax and extras? A4, mono, please!

At the top I see a blurb from the English Language StackExchange linking to http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/2/where-does-the-... - is that not coming up for you?

Nope :-(

I get this: ---

Did you mean quintin quintessential?

Welcome to Quintessential Filter Tips Ltd. Quintessential Tips Ltd. Makers and Purveyors of Fine Quality Environmentally Conscious Smoking Products. quintessentialtips.com

Quintessential | Define Quintessential at Dictionary.com adjective . 1. of the pure and essential essence of something: the quintessential Jewish delicatessen. 2. of or pertaining to the most perfect embodiment of something: the quintessential performance of the Brandenburg Concertos. dictionary.reference.com/browse/quintessential More results

Weird - would you mind sending a screen shot to help@duckduckgo.com?

Let me know what information you need and I'll send it to your feedback page. I might not be for a few hours though!

Just to follow up on this: I had a caching thing on os x chrome, and thus my problem (unrelated software) was fixed within an hour of posting.

I'm buying a t-shirt to say thanks.

Is there a way to get google results instead of yahoo results? I don't mean using the !g syntax, but getting actual google results in the format of duckduckgo.

I love the site, but alot of the time, Yahoo's results are weak.

No, but we use other results besides Yahoo's (including our own). I'd appreciate specific examples when they come up: http://duckduckgo.com/feedback.html

Congratulations, Gabriel! I am very happy for you. DDG is my default search engine, and I suggest that friends and family use it. Just wondering why you don't use https as a default setting. Also, sometimes I find the continuous scrolling of search results makes it a bit more difficult to keep track of where I have been than with Google's default 10 results per page. Consequently, sometimes I find it easier to quickly scan Google search results. I wonder if there is something further that you could tweak in this regard? Keep up the great work!

Thx! We don't use https by default because it is noticeably slower to connect. Also noted on continuous results -- our non-JS versions do have some pagination.

So what's the plan for making money with DDG?

There is some context based advertising in place already, via amazon (used to be thru some "invite only" ad service) but the volume of advertising is very low, only one ad per several visits, and I'd venture that the rate of adblock usage and non-clicking of ads is much higher among the DDG set. I hope they find a way to monetize!

Paid search results? Would it really be incongruent with what DDG is doing?

Ads. They are already running ads including amazon affiliate.

Acqusition.

They got investment. Who needs profit these days?!

If you're running a company in an industry that's being encroached on by Google, throwing some money at a serious competitor like DDG might be a good investment.

I quickly used DDG for the first time for some searches and you guys place WAY too much emphasis on exact query match domains. Also, including .com.au addresses in a local search when I'm in the US is probably not a lot of help.

Best of luck.

This is biting me as well - I use search in place of the address bar a lot. Now, in DDG, searches like "asoiaf reddit" does not find the root-site.

I think I'm not alone in using the address bar less and less.

While I'm at it:

- I would probably change the color of the address in the results to make it easier to distinguish from the excerpt/description.

- Remove the green background that is displayed on hover. I find it hard to scan entries with that big green blob hovering :)

Edit: formatting

+1 for changing the URL color. I'd prefer it directly under the title as well. And maybe find a way to emphasize the important parts of the URL, cut out the random numbers.

Thx -- we cut stuff out of the URL now, though perhaps could cut out more. Note you can change the color in the settings: http://duckduckgo.com/settings.html

We've also experimented with moving it around (including where you suggest).

Don't give me so many options when you can, with a little research, make the right decisions for me! :)

(the N % that do not agree with you can probably perform some magic to bend the site to their liking)

Agree - google's UI is 1000X more pleasant on the eyes, DDG made me dizzy and hard to distinguish between each result, especially with their infinite scroll.

Thx for the feedback - duly noted! Would appreciate the specific example for the .com.au stuff here: http://duckduckgo.com/feedback.html

DDG is a great search engine. I was stoked to see that the Midori[1] browser adopted it as the default search engine. However, if I can't seem to find something there, I try Scroogle with SSL[2]

1 - http://www.twotoasts.de/index.php?/pages/midori_summary.html

2 - https://ssl.scroogle.org/

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