DuckDuckGo launches Search & Stories app | Hacker News Reader

DuckDuckGo launches Search & Stories app

duckduckgo.com

140 pointsTitanous73 comments

Just gave it a try... This is so much better than the previous DuckDuckGo app. Focusing on stories and leveraging the search capabilities of ddg is genious (at the bottom of every news there's a "suggested searches" menu with very useful suggestions).

Cherry on the cake ? HN is one of the available sources for stories!

I'm a bit confused about the "Stories". What does it mean? Is it articles? Blog posts?

If you go into the settings, you'll see a list of sources from which they pick stories (you can customize the list).

I think they did this to have an extra thing attracting people to the app on top of pure search. People are likely to spend more time in the app because of it, and thus use DDG for more searches.

You can turn off the stories in the settings and use it as a pure search app, though.

My question for Gabriel & team would be: Is there an iPad version planned?

Stories are showcased from over 50 carefully selected sources that focus on different types of content. For example, TIME and BBC are there, but so are Reddit Funny and BuzzFeed. We also aggressively prevent depressing and duplicate stories from appearing in the feed.

>We also aggressively prevent depressing and duplicate stories from appearing in the feed.

Huh? Duplicate I can understand, but depressing stories? Isn't that subjective? What happened to dontbubbleus[0] principles of not filtering? Did Fred want a better news reader?

And here I was hoping for a new way to experience search like giving 3rd party devs more freedom to implement plugins in search…

[0] http://dontbubble.us/

It's not a filter bubble because by default everyone sees the exact same content, just like our Web search results. We decided early on to filter out things like rape, dismemberment, etc. that we thought were staunchly negative. Also, this app wasn't designed to be a traditional news reader. Instead it features interesting content that's currently being shared a lot regardless of publish date.

That's... horribly pathological. I'd even claim that's bordering on being unethical. Also, it's like the facebookey "like" button, in trying to paint everything in rainbow colors.

There is an issue with media pileup and lack of respect, but sometimes just because reporting is negative doesn't mean it's not real. In fact, you've just mentioned a huge social problem (rape) that happens even in first world cultures and is relevant whether we like it or not, that you decided to filter out.

Which is the usual case with the "irrelevant" "negative" reporting that we can't "do anything about". Actually, usually we can, but it's small, won't stroke your ego, and it's easier to hide your head in the sand and pretend nothing's happening. Because paying attention to food you eat, clothes you wear and electronics you buy is hard and isn't making life more enjoyable for you or anyone you know.

but, but, but... this _IS_ the definition of a filter bubble

Would you ever consider teaming up with the producers of This American Life or Radiolab to do some sort of curated story, perhaps centered around the issues of privacy in the modern age? I think you (collectively) could be in a great position to do an interesting take on the different angles of the story.

I was also confused.

This app goes against the grain of DDG.

Frankly I'm not interested in stories, I'm interested in search. I get my stories elsewhere.

When I start the app I want to have a keyboard come up so that I can type in keywords. I don't want to see stories or to have to tap a second time just to activate the text input area. Then I want the results to open in the external browswer of my choice.

Is there a DDG app that does this?

Thanks for the feedback. We take the ability to search fast very seriously. There are a few home screen options in the app -- just look at the settings. Also our mobile web site is still accessible and maybe preferred over the app altogether.

Is there an iPad version of the app planned?

Yes indeed!

It would be a very straight forward assumption that a DDG mobile app would laser focused on quick search. I'm curious: how did the stories feature come to be?

It has a long history, starting even before DuckDuckGo. https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=watrcoolr

Perhaps I should do a post on it on the DDG blog.

I'd gladly read that.

I'd also appreciate an option on the app to bypass the stories and cut straight to what ddg does best: no frills, no tracking search.

Just remember that as useful as this feedback could be, there's probably thousands of people that disagree with him silently and are happy with it. I think it looks pretty cool FWIW (which is not that much...).

Did you even try the app out?

You can change the options from displaying stories, to instead display recent searches, or to save searches.

In any case, the stories feature is quite nice, but I agree that it's feature creepy. I'd rather use another dedicated app for stories / RSS.

DDG might be fresh, safe and secure and have nice features; its search is still very, very weak.

You forgot the most vital reason: They respect your privacy. I personally believe it's indeed worth wasting some extra energy while searching, in order to get that respect. Not to mention it's constantly getting better. I have used DDG as my primary search eninge for the last year, and seen significant improvement.

Disagree, I don't think their inferior search results have anything to do with tracking/privacy concerns. It's just an inferior (meta-)crawler (they don't do the crawling themselves). Crawling/weighting is extremely expensive, and it doesn't seem that anyone puts in nearly as much effort to this as Google. DDG simply don't have the resources to do so.

Edit: I should point out that DDG has been my primary search engine for a year, and for most searches its results are great or at least decent enough to answer my question. I fallback to google for fuzzier queries, e.g. when I don't know what I'm looking for.

You do have a point. But I think you underestimate the power of knowing "who is asking the question". Take the search term "String" for example, the one searching might refer to "String" in (1) programming, (2) physics, (3) music, (4) clothing ... the list goes on. Let's say you know the one searching refers to (1), even here you will be better off, knowing if the one searching wants to know about the string class in Java, C++, C# or whatever..

This might be a bad example, but you get the idea. The better you know the one searching the better results you will be able to provide.

It is easy to add this information in the search – in the particular example, adding ‘Java’ will likely mean that someone is not looking for specific strings from a tropical island or the local clothing types, but your ‘type 1’ strings. Even better, the same person can look for clothing by adding an appropriate identifier, without having to worry that ‘type 1’ answers leak into their ‘type 4’ query.

I personally value a better service way more than my privacy, but everyone has the right to make their own choices, I guess.

Indeed.

Do you also keep a list of your sexual preferences, political views, medical history, etc? If so I would recommend giving this to every corporation you interact with. I mean, the odds are some of them might be able to improve their services, in some manner, using this information. Even if just one out of ten would be able to, it would be worth it, right? Since privacy doesn't really matter.

You are acting irrationally. You give the information if you think it can be useful to provide a better service.

Otherwise you have the means to withdraw from sharing information and you are supposed use them. By that I mean that, if you value your privacy and don't trust another company to keep your confidential information private, why would you trust another company to keep from collecting your information? Just don't give it in the first place!

There are throwaway accounts on forums like HN and reddit, private browsing, VPNs and anonymous remailers if you need them, but, if you don't need them, that's just noise slowing you down.

Other thoughts that are directly related to the matter in question are that it shouldn't be a problem that a company knows my sexual preferences, political views and medical history, it could be a problem if that information is shared with someone else, or used against me by that company. Second note, my confidential information should, in a perfect world, be of no matter to anyone. No company, person or government should be allowed to judge someone basing on those characteristics instead of skill, compatibility or lawfulness. It is not the case, unfortunately, but this is the reason why privacy does matter, it's because we don't live in a perfect world.

I am confused. First you describe privacy precautions as "noise slowing you down", a few arguments later you have reached the conclusion "this is the reason why privacy matter".

I set DDG as my default search engine a couple weeks ago. At least 25% of the time I give up and use Google.

I've even started instinctively switching to Google for certain searches I know DDG will fail on (particularly technical stuff)

Try prepending !s to your searches when needed in DuckDuckGo.

That will send results through StartPage, which will return you Google's results, but through a proxy (mitigating the privacy loss by using Google).

Serious question—why would I use DuckDuckGo to use StartPage to use Google?

If I was really privacy conscious, I could go straight to StartPage. If I didn't really care, I could go straight to Google.

Where does DDG fit in?

It's a front-end that gives you one entry point for StartPage, Google, Weather, IMDB, Amazon, [entire bang support list].

Just a search = "keyword list"

I want Google search = "!g keyword list"

I want Google Finance Search = "!gf keyword list"

I want Amazon products search = "!a keyword list"

No one else gives you this much freedom to coherently pass your request directly where you want it to go (AND while respecting the fact that you don't want others to know what you're searching).

"No one else gives you this much freedom to coherently pass your request directly where you want it to go"

Chrome has this built in, with the added benefit of not unnecessarily sending your searches through a 3rd party, and you can add your own custom searches, and set custom shortcuts.

Correction - Chrome has this built in, with the added benefit of using your searches and browser history for the purposes of serving advertisements (and whatever else they want to use that data for).

And yes, even in incognito, this behavior occurs within the session. And yes, even in incognito, if you happen to be logged into your google account in another tab, it's associated with your google account.

So, I prefer that DDG be my 3rd party, as opposed to Google.

Admittedly, this is personal preference, and you highlight a good point that it is probably simpler to do this via Chrome's built-in capabilities if privacy is not a major concern.

using your searches and browser history for the purposes of serving advertisements

I'm not familiar with this. How does it work? Chrome doesn't send my browser history to Google, does it?

I've not investigated the how, or where/when/if data goes places, but consider:

1. In a newly launched chrome incognito window - login to Gmail.

2. Open a new tab and launch Google.com, search for "New Relic"

3. Click through to the New Relic page.

4. Close the tab with the loaded New Relic page.

5. Open a new tab and proceed to 'lxer.com'

6. I get a New Relic ad served from Google here.

Some important notes:

1. Even if you come to this page anonymously, New Relic is one of the ads that will get served. This likely has to do with Google's placement techniques and New Relic's adsense configs and purchases. Nonetheless, with an active search history or browse history involving the given ad, I see a very high likelihood of ad display.

2. From an advertising perspective this is great.

3. From a search perspective, see the don't bubble us discussions elsewhere. Some people like to have search results filtered based on previous searches and browsing. I don't, but I'm perfectly willing to be in the minority here.

4. This technique works for the above specifics (I happened to have noticed the New Relic google ads in conjunction with web browsing in the past), and probably for many others. It will likely fail for many combinations as well. If you search and browse for medical items, they will probably not impact your lxer.com advertisements.

Incognito windows don't block cookies, they just sandbox them from the rest of your cookies and are deleted when you close the Incognito windows, so the behavior you describe isn't too surprising.

But what does that have to do with Chrome's search/history? If I use Chrome's search bar to search using StartPage there's no way for Google to know my searches or even the fact that I'm using StartPage.

I'm just saying you can get the same behavior as DDG's shortcuts with Chrome without using Google at all.

I don't know about browser history, but there's evidence that Google use your user-agent string other connection details to uniquely identify you when you connect to their servers, and to build a history of your search terms even without you having a google account. They can later use that knowledge to serve directed advertising in search results across any of their products.

I'm not saying you should use Google search, I'm saying you can get the same behavior as DDG's !x shortcuts using Chrome, not Google, so I'm not sure how the grandparent comment is related.

Re-reading this comment, I think you misunderstood. I'm saying you can use Chrome's search engine shortcut feature to search on other search engines, without using Google Search at all.

Just like I can type "!a search terms" to search Amazon using DDG, I can configure Chrome to send my search directly to Amazon if I type "a search terms".

Google can do all of the things you mentioned regardless of which browser you use if you use Google/Gmail/etc Search or visit sites that use Google Ads/Analytics (without disabling cookies or using Ghostery)

chrome still collects that data

[Citation needed]

Ah! I get you - agreed. I think that's a decent solution, it just seems like configuring Chrome to use DDG as the default engine buys you a lot of those configurations in one change. Either way, good results.

Bang searching is obsolete as far as I'm concerned. For any bang search I can think of, I'm confident that I can just search Google for the same keywords (without the bang) and still get the result I wanted. If I search for a movie title, I get IMDB in the top ~3 results, if I search for a product, I get Amazon results, etc.

Which suggests you're happy with Google's filtered/targeted search results

Using bangs, you can skip a step. I suppose if you're using Google's "I'm Feeling Lucky" in your URL bar I suppose there is little difference. However, I find there is a bit more effort when you get outside the simple realm of products or celebs.

For example, if you want to search HN, you can just `!hn searchterms` rather than search "hnsearch searchterms", then click. As someone who searches a lot of different resources frequently, the little bit of time saved is helpful.

If DDG's privacy is not a selling point for someone, then I agree with you; bangs are hardly a reason to stick with DDG.

I suppose bangs save a user input step (since I have to search from the location bar then Tab + Enter to select a Google result), but I would gladly trade that for the additional mental steps of deciding which service to search and what the bang shortcut is for that service.

> I would gladly trade that for the additional mental steps of deciding which service to search and what the bang shortcut is for that service.

There are hardly any mental steps plural, if any mental step at all. Give it a try and see if there's a bang that doesn't make sense.

Examples:

!g - Google

!b - Bing

!gm - Google Maps (also !gmaps)

!bm - Bings Maps (also !bmaps or !bingmaps)

!d - Dictionary (also !dict and !dictionary)

!t - thesaurus (also !thesarus)

!gi - Google Images (also !gim)

!gh - GitHub (also !github)

!yt - YouTube (also !youtube)

!cpp - C++ reference from cplusplus.com

!hn - Hacker News Search

!aur - Arch Linux User Repo

!trulia - Trulia

!domain - domain name search

...etc

I essentially used bangs extensively many years ago (not through DDG; I set up custom keyword searches in Firefox), and I agree that it worked quite well. I now use raw Google searches, and I think Google is now good enough that it is not worth using bangs anymore (Google privacy issues notwithstanding).

Fair enough. :) As I said in my original post, if DDG's privacy is not a selling point for someone, then I agree with you; bangs are hardly a reason to stick with DDG.

but google will just customize stuff for that proxy... how is that better for results quality?

Ditto, but I find 75% increased privacy is worth it.

I manage to find what I want most of the time using DDG.

I have had to adjust my search techniques, but I'm pleased about that because it's not just returning what it thinks I want, it's returning what I searched for.

I would ask that they consider adding a "search for results from [drop down list of countries]" option. I often get US results and not UK results.

DDG does have a feedback link, so if you want you can send information about what you searched for and what you expected to find. I accept that most people don't want to do that. Perhaps DDG need to add an easy frictionless "none of these are useful to me" button?

I assumed they were using Yahoo's search api, which in turn is powered by Bing search according to the Yahoo-Microsoft deal.

I apparently have to have an account on Google play to download this app.

Which means that in order not be tracked by Google (by using duckduckgo) I have to agree to be tracked by Google (by accepting their 'privacy' policy).

This seems to obviate the utility which I may have gained from using the app.

Anyone know where the images are coming from?

Most of them aren't pulled directly from the story. There are also copyright issues with images that make this legally tricky to pull off.

I'm curious too. But maybe a good licensing-aware image search facility can auto-match acceptable images to stories?

Installed it right away and... I love this app! Looks well polished. Easy bang search with a list of available sites right there nicely grouped. A lot of news sources (HN included) and you can suggest more or add/remove any. Region bubble is supported, but disabled by default. Save recent is also disabled. Such care for user privacy is so surprising in mobile apps, it makes me giddy :)

I don't want the app. Arrg! I am on my iPad and I can't get to what I assume is a web interface to this... Only a big ugly page with half-showing icons for how to download the android or iOS apps. Why can't I just exit out of the offer and see the desktop version? Rawrrrrr!

Just give it a try. Seems like a nicely designed app. !bangs are nicely integrated and search works well. There are a large number of sources you can choose your 'stories' page to be populated from and it seems like it is surfacing interesting content.

Very nice, really like the interface and story display on the home screen. Seems fast. I don't usually use apps for search, instead going to browser first, but I might try this app for awhile.

Have been using DuckDuckGo for the last few days (because of the PRISM incident). I feel it just redirects the query to Bing and then displays the result. Can't take it seriously.

It uses many different sources to get it's information. Bing is probably one of them, yes. What is it, that makes you feel you can't take it seriously? It does in fact do what it says on the tin, which is letting you search in an +- anonymous way.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuckDuckGo#Features

Well, it should query more from Google. I often find it is almost identical from Bing, with poor results. That's the major problem. A minor one is it is very slow but I can live with that.

Why should it query more from Google for people to 'take it seriously'?

Edit: It is through tracking that Google gets results that some people see as being superiour to those of DuckDuckGo: Google's model of you makes them think that they know what you want to see, and they give you those pages.

Is this news? I downloaded it a few days ago. When did it launch?

The current version was launched today according to the info on the Play store.

You don't need any additional app(s). Dolphin Browser already supports DuckDuckGo directly. Any other browser also should have search engine configuration options. (Don't you guys remember, I won't install your app discussion.)

is there a way I can change the default Google now shooing on android (the one at the very bottom of the screen) to this?

yep. install the app. google now should give you two options. select and set as default...

Does this app use SSL?

This is neat! :)

So awesome. But please make an app for us BlackBerry Z10 users. Blackberry's encryption and privacy features is a nice fit with Duck Duck Go's anonymous search.

Don't forget us!

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