Announcing Duck It, a new way to search | Hacker News Reader

Announcing Duck It, a new way to search

duckduckgo.com

135 pointsepi0Bauqu94 comments

I love it. If you're looking for an article on a particular topic, this lets you skim them basically before deciding which one to read. A good sample is:

http://duckduckgo.com/?q=c%23+custom+controls&v=d

A quick browse lets you pick the article that seems closest to what you're actually trying to do.

Google still owns on being able to find absolutely anything (Duck Duck Go still seems limited to somewhat mainstream searches), but Duck Duck Go is seriously starting to own on sensible search features that actually improve the search experience. So many people are trying to build the next way of searching, and a lot of what they come up with is insane. I really don't want a 3d cloud of search results. It's not about looking pretty. It's about finding what I want. Duck Duck Go gets this like no one since Google.

I like the preview feature. I wish this had more features though. It would be neat to divide the search results into some higher-level buckets, so I know which links are blog postings, mainstream media, forums, etc.

Thx for the suggestion, which I also heard from several beta testers. I think this is a great idea, but we wanted to release something sooner than later.

No problem. Great site. I always welcome better search technologies.

In regards to the filtering I think allowing the user to do a bunch of cross-filters would be of immense value. Factors like type of website, author, creation/update date, etc. help bring the results down to another level of granularity.

This won't be useful for all searches, but would really help optimize certain types of queries (e.g. seeking an answer to a specific problem).

I often restrict searches by date on Google but rarely use the other options. It might be nice to have a refinement by focus of the site - is it a site mainly on the topic I'm searching for or is it a general site.

I think your user interface is great, but you could probably figure out a better brand.

Yes. I was going to say that too although I don't think the interface is great. If nothing else do two things: get a new logo and have a visual designer smooth out the edges of your site. It is simple but not clean at all.

I find the name memorable, at the very least. This must represent some value.

It took about a year before I finally started to remember that "Duck Duck Go" was a search engine. Before then I'd see the name and frown, unsure whether it was a social networking site or a web app for tracking doctor visits.

The real problem with "Duck Duck Go" is that it's too long and not easily verbed. You'll notice everyone is going for the easily verbed names because they're marketable and great.

I used Duck Duck Go for a month or so earlier this year. I liked it and thought it was awesome for general queries like movie or person names but pretty bad for text searches, like error messages. For this reason, I returned to Google. I also thought there were way too many "Search on these sites..." icons for that to be useful in any way; if Google was easily searched from there with just a click, I may not have changed back.

Most people don't like the name "Duck Duck Go", and it's too long, I think. Guy should rebrand it into something similar but under two syllables.

There was a blog post recently on naming your startup where I think the author had a good point on looking for names that can be "verbed": don't worry, people will find a way.

In this case, they've made their verb obvious: Duck It. Pretty easy, no?

When someone says "Just Duck It", though, I always think they got their consonants wrong and want me to give up.

"Bing" has similar issues - is the past tense "bang"? "I bang her on the Internet"?

Pretty sure the past tense is "bung."

Not that this is much of an improvement.

Google was once a really silly name.

When I first saw Google, I thought someone made a typo.

Someone did...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google#Name

Interesting. I always thought "Google" was just a clever mix of "googol" (a huge amount) and "Go Ogle", (go look/search/etc).

</disillusionment>

Yeah, I assumed a trademark-ised version of Googol.

Google is a single word though, and those k sounds are so harsh and interrupting, Duck Duck Go is a really bad name IMO.

I agree. "Google it" make sense. "Bing it" makes sense.

But "Duck it"? Somehow the name feels a little off to me.

"Duck it" is used sometimes as a replacement for "Fuck it!". Also it suggest to "duck out of", ie avoid, something or just to "duck", ie dodge by crouching or bending down.

I can see the idea of a duck diving down to retrieve a tasty bit of food (weed!).

How about "pekin", it's the name of a duck and suggest "peek in" to me. Sadly pekin.com is squatted but then what isn't. It's slightly awkward for "pekin it". Or "scoter", another duck; sounds like "spotter" and could be used as "scot it" which also sounds like "[he]'s got it".

Not really there but, some thoughts anyhoo.

I have to say: some great stuff going on there.

but

Too jittery, too complicated results page and too many bright icons for me.

It might produce awesome results but at the end of the day search is about information not a fancy UI. This is one reason Google are so successful - because there is nothing daunting about viewing their results page.

Duck Duck Go results pages actually have less on them than Google results pages. I think we're just so used to Google that we don't see 80% of the stuff that's there.

Very very impressed. You do a search for droid, it asks you which meaning of droid, including the cell phone, the star wars characters, and three other meanings I didn't know existed. That questioning of which meaning of the word your looking for is an incredible innovation right there. It's also so simple a concept, too. Like so many simple ideas, I'm smacking my head that I hadn't thought of it myself. I wonder if they use wikipedia for the disambiguation.

Man, props to you guys and Cuil for trying, but this has got to be an incredibly difficult market to break into these days.

There are a few differences here, I think.

It's very difficult for Bing to gain any traction because it does pretty much the exact same thing as Google. The differences aren't compelling enough to switch.

Cuil is really cool, and wants to be different, but it's been hyped up too much for how much it improves. It's a big-budget startup that needs to actually gain traction in order to be successful.

Duck It, from what I can tell is a low-budget engine that brings a slightly different twist to searching (more context). Since it's low budget, it doesn't need to be a home run hit to be successful (like cuil), and it doesn't need to be better than Google at being Google (like Bing). All it needs to do is be good enough at providing context that some small group of people goes to it when the search term's appropriate. If they can get that and build on it, then they can be a niche player. Being a niche player is a success, and at that point they can look into strategies for breaking out of the niche.

Agreed! I don't think world domination can or should be the goal of every company. There's something quite respectable about doing great work for a devoted group of customers / users.

I love what you guys are doing, but the gray color of your default text is a little hard on my eyes. Could you darken it just a tad?

Black. Readability should trump aesthetics (especially on search results). Maximum contrast, plz.

It was my understanding that dark grey was actually better than black for readability? Granted, much darker than Duck Duck Go is currently using.

Also on readability: I find the search result synopsis far too wide for easy reading.

I've noticed that the increased width can make it a little awkward to read, too

I really like #333 myself. Nice and dark, still a bit softer than black.

Or maybe add an option to your settings to allow users to pick their own.

This would satisfy everyone from the people that like your grey to the black and the #333 guy.

90% of your users probably won't touch it, but the ones who would may appreciate it.

Looks interesting.

[Edit] Is there anyway to make safe search the default like most search engines do?

I'm not keen on seeing NSFW links like Encyclopedia Dramatica appearing when I'm searching from a work computer.

Most searches make you turn safe search off to get NSFW sites.

Yup, click settings at the bottom.

Sorry. :) You replied why I was editing my reply to make it clearer. Shouldn't Safe Search be the default? Normally users have to opt out of Safe Search to see NSFW content.

Impressive results, and unlike others I like your branding overall.

Minor complaints: it is a bit garish, color-wise - maybe dial down the saturation and white a bit. Fonts are too big, I prefer more info and don't need to read from across the room. On Chrome, as the page fills it starts gently scrolling down and search box slides of the screen...oops. The 'web links' section is getting kind of lost and most people won't notice it exists.

Finally, I don't like 'Zero-click Info tm' - I hate 'TMs' and you don't have one on your logo, so why here? Second, it's a service mark, not a trade mark. Third, it's only an element in your service, and branding it strongly competes with your primary DDG brand and creates pointless confusion for the user.

but overall I really like it, and think the quality of the results is very high. I will use and recommend regularly. If you are going to commercialize it with ads or the like, do so early so people don't call you a sellout later. Excellent job!

Seconding the wish for smaller presentation -- think you're a bit below the sweet spot on the info-per-square-inch curve. I feel pretty hampered.

I have gone through my search history in Google and compared it to Duck Duck Go. The results are pretty good for most queries and really good for some queries. Some good results:

* http://duckduckgo.com/?q=%09dragon+age+review&v=d (Drago age review)

* http://duckduckgo.com/?q=surrogates+&v=d (surrogates)

Great overview for reviews and the engine knows that "surrogates" can mean different things.

Some lacking results:

* http://duckduckgo.com/?q=python+unix+time&v=d (python unix time)

* http://duckduckgo.com/?q=Marc+Cohn+-+Walking+in+Memphis&... (walking in memphis)

"python unix time" does not return any matches. Google's video results are superior when searching after "walking in memphis".

I don't know how you're doing it, but you are vastly superior to Google for certain topical searches that are totally spammed up over there.

http://duckduckgo.com/?q=H1N1+flu&v=d

http://duckduckgo.com/?q=flu+vaccine&v=d

I like your focus on improving UI but I think you need to do some customer development work. Figure out whom to target and fulfill their search needs.

E.g.: We need search for hardcore search users. 100 results above the fold. Clear ways to influence the algorithm. Shortcuts to search for specific meta-data. Etc, etc.

of the limited searches I did, it seemed to have worked. I think the best was when I searched for "schema migration django" and it came up with South at the top, whereas google has South at #4. I think I'm biased in these results because South was mentioned in the article about how django devs said no to including South, and not any of the others,which makes me think that it's the canonical one.

This is the first time I'd consider using duckduckgo for my searches, since they had a better showing on some searches I cared about, which makes me wonder what else they'd be good at. To be honest, I'm surprised.

I think the design, the branding, and the result layout have some problems (certainly nothing insurmountable, just needs polish).

However the results blew me away - I consistently get far more useful results than Google (at least for some technical searches). Congrats on this - the product has great potential, and with the declining quality of Google search results (and crappy competition), you have a good shot at breaking into the market.

Good luck!

I needed a while to get used to the colorful interface, but I like that it includes favicons.

I don't think it would replace Google search for me, but since I found it to turn up good results, and it had "Add to Chrome" links everywhere, I made it my default search engine in Chrome and I'm willing to try it out for at least a week. Unfortunately, that means giving up auto-complete in my search bar.

Thanks. I'd really appreciate you emailing me the results of your tryout. Auto-complete/suggestions are on the short list for new features.

1. I use the arrow keys to scroll in Firefox. You have made them move me up and down through the set of results. I see what you're trying for, but it's too jerky and confusing for me.

2. If I hold down TAB and click on an item in the Zero-Click Info section, my current tab still gets redirected to the linked page. This is now how links normally behave in Firefox.

I like the 'take a peek' feature. It reduces the number of times I've to return to search results.

One suggestion, on the results page, when I click the "Duck it" icon on left corner, it takes me to homepage. It's a bit confusing since I expected it to toggle my 'normal search' results to 'duck it' results.

Seems nice, but I need a "did you mean" spell check. I simply can't spell well enough, and have been trained by google not to care. When I misspell something on duckduckgo it doesn't even warn me, it just gives me low quality pages created by people who also can't spell.

I tried it myself, and I must agree with some other people. The branding is a bit cheesy. While some people considered Google to be cheesy in the beginning as well, the name was a bit more consistent with the brand. While almost anything can turn into a brand name simply by being unique, the names that already exist for search are traditionally derived from what Yahoo! started. Bing, Google, etc. are all expansions of this. Duckduckgo.com is easy to remember, though. As for the search, I think it is fantastic. It is very slow, but the results seem to be very good, and the interface is clean. I would actually switch to using it if the results were obtained faster.

Possible tagline: "If you can't Duck It, fuck it"

I've been using it for the last several weeks and at least for me it has been returning much more valuable links than Google. Part of that may be that they aren't big enough to have indexed all the lower quality sites.

"Duck It builds on the core idea of Duck Duck Go that search results improve when you get useful, readable content in addition to links."

I don't understand the difference between "Duck It" and "Duck Duck Go"

Duck Duck Go is name of the search engine. Duck It is the name of the new search view (one of 4 avail from home page).

Hooray, thanks for showing that search isn't done and Google is stuck.

Who is the targeted audience of this product? The UI reminds me a little bit of Ask.com

While I don't understand why people need this search engine, I am impressed by the traffic this site is getting.

It's a general purpose search engine, designed to be a drop-in replacement for the majors. However, it does have features that should appeal in particular to schools, homes, and people doing a lot of what is x searches.

Traffic has grown steadily over the past year. While there isn't strictly a need for a new search engine, some decent % of people who try it out like its unique features.

Just as impressive duckduckgo team, a search engine startup from the Philadelphia are -- not the most likely of locations to see this technology come out of.

Kudos and keep up the great work.

So far I've found better results.

Few complaints: 1. The results are a little hard on the eyes to scan. The gray may be too similar to the background, and the consistently large text/different size/color of highlighted words, possible overusage of icons, I find distracting.

2. I did a search and for some reason it picked shopping as default. Not sure why? I later realized the logo had a shopping cart on it and redid the search for the type I was looking for - and my results were great!

I don't see a compelling reason to use this over google/wikipedia/dictionary/etc.

Is there a compelling reason?

edit: Also this page http://duckduckgo.com/?q=computer&v=d just seems like bad flow - "ERROR!". If I want to search for computer, I want to search for computer. If the results are not what I expect, I'll modify it. At least show the results in a standard layout every time.

I tried to lay this out as succinctly as I could in the post :)

The primary reason and goal of Duck Duck Go is to get you the information you're searching for faster, and with less mental effort.

This new view in particular does that by reducing the clicking back and forth between results. It pulls out good info from pages where it exists. Often you click to a page and then search for your terms within that page, only to find they don't exist or only exist in a cursory or unrelated fashion.

By displaying paragraphs of readable text, you should get a much better idea whether that page has what you want. And I hope that in some cases you won't actually have to click. The take a peek feature (hover over magnifying glass) furthers this hope.

Another way to look at part of it is we are saving you (at least partially) from the myriad of interfaces that exist on all the sites on the Internet. We pull out the good parts, via Duck It or Take a Peek, and standardize the formatting for you.

But: "Duck Duck Go knows Computer can mean different things." Isn't this a bit braggy/evident/confusing? Why not just "Computer can mean different things"?

And at least still show search results for 'computer' like the user asked for. Otherwise the page is completely useless.

Compare their results for "a* search" with Google's. One has a video about police searches in the first page of results, and the other is Duck It.

They both have the same first result :/ I don't see a vid for police searches either... Google loads quicker and gives consistent result layout.

"Damn, those Google guys are fast!" ;)

you guys are doing interesting stuff. i think your interface needs a lot of work. i'm not a designer myself, so apologies for the lack of constructive criticism (as a user, it's prolly wrong anyway). i can say that i just felt overwhelmed and hard to read....i didn't want to read the results...maybe too wide....

anyway, i wanted to point out carrot2, which is a clustering engine with a beautiful and engaging interface. i really like the carrot2 website. gives me good vibes.

i have to be honest, though. when it comes down to it i just use google. like someone else said, when you're searching for error messages....

otherwise, i'm usually searching for something easy that presumably everyone gets, and certainly google gets so why do anything different.

occasionally i have "un-google-able" phrases (!), either because the words i'm searching on are super overloaded and common, or because i have a vague notion of what i'm looking for. in those cases, i try to remember to use carrot2, and possibly duckduck....but yeah.....would be nice to have an extension that identified when i was having search trouble and automatically did a look up in other search engines for me....

One more suggestion... The feature to see the content that the search engine sees (I think that is what this is. It loaded so slowly that I could not quite verify.) should be on a separate page for advanced users. Basic end users neither care nor need to know about this information because most users will not be concerned with search engine optimization.

I just played around with it for a few minutes, but I really enjoyed the web icons on the left allowing me to immediately identify if I was looking at a video result from YouTube, a news site, etc. I also like that you let me choose the meaning of the word I searched for.

I love the name, too. But I also love ducks and making duck sounds, so perhaps I'm a bit biased.

Am I searching for the wrong thing? All my custom searches did not produce good results. In fact, some were just embarrassing. None of them had the 'zero click answer' thing. Props for trying, but all the major search engines have their own 'instant answers' as well as results that are reasonable most of the time.

What were you trying to search for?

When I searched for my own name, I thought it was cool you recognized my own website as the "Official Site". Then I searched for several other key phrases [cityname web design] and didn't like how it said something was the official site, just because it has the keyword phrase in the title and domain name.

The design feels very clunky. I could be wrong, but my gut reaction is that the spacing seems off, colors seem off, font-sizes seem off, and the visual hierarchy isn't immediately apparent. Fix those minor quibbles and I think you've got a winner, since, most importantly, the results look very good.

As others have mentioned here the search returns fantastic results in some highly-specificed domains (e.g. "schema migration django" according to user iamwil). There may be an opportunity driving a wedge into a niche, establishing a beachhead, then expanding with what momentum it affords you?

Didn't Apple come down on Google with a legal hammer for the dock-like icon-zooming behaviour on their front page? (Can't seem to find the reference at the mo..) Also, "I'm Feeling Ducky"? DuckDuckGO seems to like walking those legal thin lines, eh?

That said, at first glance this seems better than Cuil :-)

Fairly good search results, except for one thing: it seemed to me that the highest ranked results tended to be "aggregation sites" that contain links to the original material. I prefer to be pointed to the original sites.

This comment is based on only 5 minutes of experimenting, but is hopefully fair.

this guy is winning me over. keep doing what you do.

>> "We try to free you from "search yo-yo," the endless clicking forward and back between links."

FWIW, I don't think many people do that any more. If they're not sure, they just open a few results in new tabs until they get the one they wanted.

If by "people" you mean "people like you", then you MIGHT be right. If you did $25/head usability testing with normal people, I'd wager less than 5% would do this-- or even know that it COULD be done.

yeah sorry you're probably right. Seems most people don't really mind clicking back if they clicked on the wrong result.

Speaking of tabs, I often use the middle mouse button to open a link in a new tab. While you can left click anywhere on the text to open in the current window, the only place you can middle click is on the small link itself. This feels a bit inconsistent.

Also, the search box is too small for entering anything more than a few words.

On the positive side, the expanded text summaries are nice to find relevant content faster.

Most techies maybe, but not most people.

Maybe people like us -- I don't think most people know about tabs.

I like this concept and I felt happy using the site. I was a bit surprised to not see any ads though! How are they monetizing it? Also, I was a bit confused with how "Duck it!" was different from normal search. Are they synonymous?

Small usability nitpick: please make the search box wider. On more specific searches, the search box does not show all the search terms, forcing me to select text/drag cursor to make sure I spelled everything correctly.

I would prefer you to show the full url, because it offers more info on the link.

For example, when looking at blog articles, the date the article was written is part of the url...

One problem I noticed: When a youtube video popped up in the results, the summary was a warning about having JS turned off and not having flash.

I would use this with a slightly improved UI. The bright color scheme with pink for keywords doesn't really work. But the results were spot on!

I felt a little overwhelmed. Kinda like not knowing what is going on. But may be I'm in a tiny minority going by the other comments.

the name really doesn't matter. if it's useful and people like it it could be named almost anything. good luck breaking into the search engine space guys.

Ghostery blocks the display of zero-click search results.

Not sure what this means. I am the author of Ghostery.

Can you explain what you mean?

Hi, first off thanks for ghostery :). It's just that when ghostery is enabled and blocking duckduckgo tracking, the second part of the search results (Zero-Click stuff)are not showing up. Whereas when i un-block duckduckgo, it does show up.

I love this

It really surprised me, the searches gave extremely relevant results, I might say better than Google.

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