Hacker News Reader

I redirect to Google for my site search at Fight Aging! at the moment because it returns far better results than DDG, and with my ~8000 posts and countless topics doing a great job with my own custom search just doesn't make economic sense. If DDG could do as well as Google for the archives I'd switch in an instant; I prefer the idea of sending users somewhere other than Google for queries that may involve medical conditions. But results are the trump card; they have to be good.

I tend to cover any given topic in a brace of interlinked posts across years, and all topics are complex. e.g.:

https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=site%3Afightaging.org+...

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=site%3Afightaging.org+gut+bacteria

DDG misses the AGE connection in the results, which is important in this topic.

Many searches are upon specific factors or markers or genes, and for these DDG falls down badly e.g.:

https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=site%3Afightaging.org+...

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=site%3Afightaging.org+IL-1

https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=site%3Afightaging.org+...

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=site%3Afightaging.org+p27

At least you get indexed by DDG. Curvio has been live for 2 months now, Google has indexed over 2000 of our pages, and we're the #1 result for over 100 different Google queries. Meanwhile, DDG still thinks you're searching for "Cuervo" [1] and has not even indexed our homepage, which has hundreds of backlinks at this point.

[1] http://duckduckgo.com/?q=curvio

Yeah, getting indexed seems like a problem with DDG sometimes. Is there a way to submit a sitemap.xml or something similar?

Nope. They explicitly say they do not plan to accept sitemaps.

Kind of silly, but then again I've never tried to make a search engine.

I think that might boil down to Bing apparently not having indexed you. From what I can tell, DDG gets a decent proportion of its search results from the Yahoo BOSS API, which I believe is these days mostly feeding Bing data.

The results there look pretty similar, anyway: http://www.bing.com/search?q=curvio

This is the problem... In the short run, DDG may be winning small victories. In the long run, they definitely need to build their own index. They need to at least start now, then turn the switch on when it's ready. Of course it's gonna require major infrastructure, but they are building a search engine, so that's a given.

Building their own index is only worthwhile if they can build a good ranking algorithm to go along with it. And they're at a huge disdvantage in doing so because they don't track users to improve quality whereas Bing does.

it could be an open source project, i'd be interested

You could start by playing around with this data: http://commoncrawl.org/

The ways you can interact with it currently are limited, but I think that'll improve.

That project looks amazing. But it'd be nicer to have some sort of compressed raw dump to use different tools.

Thanks for having people answer feedback with real emails. My feedback has been mostly about the existence of malware-wrapped download links for popular tools like FileZilla, PuTTY, vlc, etc. I've gotten good support responses that have removed particular links, but how do I bubble this up into a feature with the goal of never showing a user a non-official download?

I wish to thank you for DDG. I left Google 1 year ago and have never looked back. DDG is better in every way for me. You provide a great service and a big peace of mind for all the hackers of the planet. Now we can compete with the empire without worrying for the empire to copy our ideas. Your courage in competing with this giant is an example we should all copy!

There are alternatives to DuckDuckGo, but not Google?? :)

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=alternative+to+duckduckgo

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=alternative+to+google

alternativeTo seems to call it googlecom

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=alternative+to+googlecom http://alternativeto.net/software/googlecom/

I've certainly noticed a speed difference recently. DDG feels pretty snappy to me now, whereas before it was annoyingly slow, easily taking a second or so to load. I'm located in Luxembourg.

Same here (Switzerland/Germany). GGD is still not as fast as Google (noticeable delay between the zero-click info and the search results) but definitely a big improvement.

I've certainly noticed a difference in speed. I've been using DDG solid for around a couple years now and the only thing I ever really lament is the speed, so I'm very glad you guys are working on it. And it is definitely getting better. And, as always, I can't live without the disambiguation feature, it saves me so much time.

I am a fan.

I'll also note that what you serve in day ... is about what Google serves in a minute.

http://www.quora.com/How-many-search-queries-does-Google-ser...

I've been using DDG at home and at work for at least a year and boy as there been improvements! First of all, I'm swedish and queries in swedish have improved immensly! I can't remember DDG ever being notably slow, so I don't know for the speed-up (I don't care much for speed). But answers in english have improved in quality by magnitude of 10s. When I started using DDG I'd have to check back with google about 1/3 of my queries, but now it's around 1/50, and I can't say the way I do my searches has had any radical changes either.

Thanks for this

Way cool. Going to try using this as my default search engine for a while.

I really really like the "alternative to" feature. What could I do to help you get better at alternatives which are not as popular? (eg, "alternative to cheetahmail" or "alternative to grubhub" or "alternative to xkcd"?)

Also, what kind of feedback would you need to help improve the tech-related searches? Like "ebcdic table" or "1010 in hex"?

The alternatives are pulled from http://alternativeto.net so adding to their site will add to the zero-click info.

You can contribute to tech-related searches by contributing to the open source zero-click info (see this tutorial https://github.com/duckduckgo/duckduckgo/wiki/Open-Source-Pl...).

You can also send in ideas here: https://duckduckgo.uservoice.com/forums/5168-plugins.

Obligatory meta-comment:

http://alternativeto.net/software/alternativeto/

there's already a goodie for base conversions (though currently base conversions are done via Wolfram Alpha, not sure why).

Ideas for more goodies are on https://duckduckgo.uservoice.com/

Not sure what uservoice is, but there is also an official trello board: https://trello.com/board/duckduckgo-open-source-plugins/4f08...

I agree, DDG is very cool.

As I understood a while ago that Google tracks my search habits, I avoid using it. I went back to WebCrawler, Cuil, Altvista, Bing... None of these compare to DDG in terms of quality.

Great job. It is time to get an alternative to Google. Don't be evil is just a silly marketing gag.

Does Bing not track your searches?

I don't know, but I expect they do. This is too big business nowadays.

But, as I written, I did not check and don't want to spread rumors.

I tried it as default engine for a month and unfortunately had to go back to Google. There are some nice touches (such as automatic wikipedia links) but in many cases the results are just not as good as Google gets.

The shortcuts are what converted me to a happy user. Programming question? "my search !so". Map? "address !m". Will True Knowledge have a good answer? "How old is Obama? !tk". For Wolfram Alpha: "How old is Obama !wa". Is Google really the best place for the answer? "who won the australian open !g". Even if 90% of your searches are google, ddg is a great way to access it!

The thing is that, for example, for programming questions google finds it on SO without any shortcuts needed. If I type address in Google it will give me a link to the map anyway. I know it takes a second to type !whatever, but you need to remember that. And if you need to stop and think "was it !so or !s or !stack or whatever it was?" you lose your concentration and next thing you know you've spent half hour browsing unrelated articles on Wikipedia. Exaggerating a bit but the point is these !things are a speedbump.

I disagree. Most of them are extremely intuitive. Heck, I've once found out about new bangs I didn't know by typing in the name/abbreviation of the site as a bang on a whim, and it worked!

Also, if you think the bangs are unintuitive, what's your opinion on keyboard shortcuts? It's basically the same thing.

Now that you have investors, they'll expect you to multiply DDG's worth. So how do you make money with it?

Screw that! Just keep giving me the service I love for free!

Sorry, I know you need to make a living. :-) Just don't try to do it by leveraging my identity or trying my patience, please?

There are sponsored links - like on Google.

Also, he uses affiliate programs. So if a link in the search results goes to Amazon for example, he'll add his affiliate code to the link.

Any idea why Google doesn't do that? I'm guessing it's against the terms and conditions? In which case I have to wonder why DDG can do it.

I'm guessing it's not against the T&C's, otherwise Amazon would have closed his affiliate account by now. They're quite good at that.

Google probably doesn't see the point. I'm sure there's something in the T&C's that would allow Amazon to close an affiliate account for any reason they want to. If they still get the same amount of traffic from Google either way, they'd close it.

Making money with a search engine is a solved problem. Making a search engine worth switching to is not-- that's what they are (and should be) focused on. I'd wager their investors are telling them the same thing.

This was news to me. What is the solution to making money as a privacy preserving search engine?

You can still make money off of targeted ads. The difference is you can only target the current query.

I also think DuckDuckGo hands out affiliate links to places like Amazon.

Wow, the visual refresh really did you good. Congrats!

And I didn't know that DDG is written in Perl, good looking Perl too.

The first thing I saw in the code was that it used one of my favorite modules, Moo, which is a neat subset of "Moose".

http://search.cpan.org/~ribasushi/Moo-0.009013/lib/Moo.pm

Even I can (almost) write good looking code with Moo(se). :-)

Congrats! Go Philly-based startups!!!!

Since 3/2/2012 I started using Trisquel linux (Was feeling guilty having used non-free linux distros so wanted to pay homage to R. Stallman).

DDG comes as default in Trisquel with web browser, Midori. I usually keep Javascript disabled.

Actually DDG's javascript less search result is in my opinion the best thing I appreciate about DDG.

Thanks for your hard work. I'll see if I can contribute to the project in any way I can.

Hi, nice work =) I started using ddg when it appeared on the udacity "how to build a search engine" course.

Thought it was an awesome name and had to check it out, and since I was already considering switching from google it was good timing.

keep up the good work =)

I LOVE your work. So happy to get simple, clean & shareable results again!

Any chance of integrated media galleries? I think Bing & Google are really effin this up.

Can you be more specific as to what you mean/want in this area?

Right now when I search for something like 'reddit logo png' I only get links no inline embedded images in a gallery like format.

Would be awesome to Not leave DDG and preview the image (jpg/png/gif) results in a gallery.

Hope that made more sense now :)

Can you guys talk Apple into adding it as a preset search-bar option in Safari? It's kind of a pain to add it yourself or get out of the habit of using the search-bar

If you're a GlimmerBlocker user there's a filter you can install which redirects safari searches to DDG...

http://glimmerblocker.org/wiki/Filters

I use SafariOmnibar[1] to add DDG as my default search provider. Since an omnibar will be shipped by default with Safari in Mountain Lion, I am also hoping that Apple will consider providing DDG as an option for search engine preference (especially on iOS as well).

[1] http://hackemist.com/SafariOmnibar/

Thanks dude. Thanks for giving us some hope for privacy.

Definitely feels faster here in Paris, France.

One thing I miss from google is auto-fixing keyboard language layout.

Thank you. You're awesome.