Comment by ploxiln | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ploxiln | Hacker News Reader

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There are 10x the customers who don't have any idea about these search operators, and sometimes accidentally include one, and are dissatisfied with the results. Companies can't help but cater to the 10x bigger market. They probably spend money less carefully too, so are more valuable to advertisers.

I don't attribute any malice to this kind of thing. I just expect that if a project or product is trying to be more easy and delightful to more users, using telemetry and the latest UX design research etc, then it's going to stop being a tool for smart technical people, even if that's how it became known in the first place. It wants to be a solution, a product, not a tool.

I've realized that I like tools, particularly those that require skill to use. The mass market just always goes the other way. You'll have to find another niche project/product. The great benefit of locally-run open-source software is that you can keep using the tool even if the project goes a different way, and open-source projects can be forked by even smaller interested groups.

> There are 10x the customers who don't have any idea about these search operators, and sometimes accidentally include one, and are dissatisfied with the results

but then they could disable them by default, and users can enable them in the settings ? Removing them entirely just makes the product worse.

Or add a button, etc.

I take it you don't have real world experience with product management?

Adding options isn't free. If you drop a feature you can delete the code and stop testing it. It you make it an option instead, you need to maintain and test two features instead of one, even though one is only used by a tiny minority of users. If you have N binary options that creates a total of 2^N different configurations. If the features are perfectly orthogonal you only need to test N+1 things, but in reality, features may interact in unexpected ways, and you may have to test a significant subset of 2^N combinations to make sure you've covered all real-world scenarios.

And you will still get confused users. “Why does Bob get different results than me? Are you profiling me?” Alice complains, forgetting that she had turned a feature on/off in the options. etc.

That doesn't mean you should never add any options: many products require a certain amount of configurability to adapt to different user needs. But there is a cost to adding features, and a product manager should carefully consider the pros and cons. If “just make it an option” is your answer to everything you will end up with an unmaintainable product that is likely to confuse the majority of users.

I hear you, and yet DDG takes this to the extreme by maintaining completely separate frontends for those who don't want to run JS or want to sidestep the getting-started hand-holding (https://html.duckduckgo.com/html and https://start.duckduckgo.com/ respectively; while digging into that, I also learned they have https://lite.duckduckgo.com/lite too for whatever that does)

So a hypothetical expert.ddg.gg wouldn't be out of character for them

I am aware that there is a slight nuance here between what one may consider just theming of the frontend versus potentially changing how query syntax works, but I just wanted to point out that DDG has embraced UX-flags-via-domain-name which would be in-your-face different from some secret toggle on a settings page

I think with a "privacy focused" search engine that isn't the default on virtually any device or browser, you get a pretty savvy subset of the general population. The 10x probably use whatever the default search is.

> There are 10x the customers who don't have any idea about these search operators

The homepage of duckduckgo contains a lot of information about their products, and a whole FAQ about the search engine. Maybe if they also included a list of these operators, inexperienced people might learn about them.

People don't use these operators because they don't know about them, not because it's difficult.

> The homepage of duckduckgo contains a lot of information about their products

How many people read these pages?

Sites like DDG explicitly require opting out of the 'Google economy' which is going to bias their userbase disproportionately towards higher information users. I can even give a specific example how this changes things. In March 2022 DDG decided to start downranking "Russian disinformation." You might reasonably claim that the average response to this would be no worse than neutral.

But the impact on DDG? You can see the results on their traffic here [1]. I have to use an archive link because they removed public reporting of traffic figures shortly thereafter. The graph there defaults to display traffic averaged out over 365 days, but the day figure (on the top left of the graph) is configurable, since the data is (somewhat oddly) all client-side. Change it to something like a 7 day average to actually be able to see what happened.

Basically smaller sites are serving different demographics. That's precisely how they succeed. And this is also where a lot of their word of mouth comes from, which is going to be a major factor in their growth. Take your users for granted, and you risk losing not only them - but also the growth they would have provided you with. You even risk getting the opposite - of negative word of mouth. In any case, it's a sure path to rapid decline for any smaller company.

[1] - https://web.archive.org/web/20220511093804/https://duckduckg...

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