Personally I've found that the extra features on top of Yahoo's results that DDG gives aren't usually very useful, but it's nice and fast with a simple, usable interface. For the few weeks I had it as my Firefox search box default, the only thing I felt was missing was how Google includes results from Google News and Image Search right on your search results page.
Also, the founder of DDG posts here on HN, which is one reason why you'll hear about it around here more often than other places.
Curious, what do you think the plethora of other alternatives are? I've been pretty unimpressed by the small search engines trying to use their own indexes (Cuill) and even less impressed by the "human-powered" engines (Mahalo). I haven't seen anyone else really come close to Google, Yahoo, Bing, and Ask.
However, we do not use BOSS straight up. We re-rank, omit, edit, merge, etc. in ways (I think and hope) yield much more relevant results, especially for more specific queries.
The Yahoo/MS search deal shouldn't effect us. We already have Bing in place as a backup and could easily switch to Ask's feed as well. We treat them as somewhat of a commodity, i.e. an output of the Web link graph, with our ranking stuff on top doing the important "last mile" work.
Thx for your feedback about news & images.
We've tried to achieve that goal via UI and a number of features that may or may not appeal to you individually. We also try to concentrate on features that the major search engines won't do because of their business position. A lot of those features are listed here: http://duckduckgo.com/about.html
What's not listed there that I think appeals to this crowd in particular is the background relevancy stuff I mentioned in my other comment and answer to your other question: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=979479
I think what also appeals to people like me (and by extension, I assume a lot of HN types) is keyboard shortcuts, aggressive filtering of parked/spam domains, and disambiguation.
We do have our own index and use it to improve relevancy as well as to add our own Zero-click Info and links to search result pages. Search any major topic and you should see a red box on top with a quick snippet and related topics. We also use it to build our own category and disambiguation pages, e.g. http://duckduckgo.com/c/Social_bookmarking
Our most recent major feature launch was Duck It!, a search view accessible from our homepage that features more topic summaries, e.g. http://duckduckgo.com/?q=tinychat&v=d. HN feedback link here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=919505
Of course, we'd welcome suggestions for additional features/improvements!
If I accidentially do this at home, or if I find that I have to use tor too often while in coffee shops to ensure I see all search results, (or if I use tor and some idiot has forced it on for those IPs), that could be a problem.
Also, I wonder how hard it would be to spoof packets to kill IPs one doesn't even have access too? Do you send a nonce back to the user and check it before completing the banning process?
I wanted to try the extreme case (at least for a time) to see if a lot of schools and businesses that use one static IP would find the process super simple and just use it. After all, they could set all their computers to safe search in one click. This experiment is ongoing, but it will probably evolve into a program where we have more of a back and forth opt-in process.
I hope this addresses your concern!
they're still small, they still listen to feedback.
Could we have an ad & donation supported open source search engine running on top of AWS or Google Apps? (Yes, the 2nd one would be ironic, if even allowed to exist by Google.) Perhaps this would be a way to combine the responsiveness of Duck Duck Go or the early Google with the infrastructure and computational horsepower of Google/Bing ca. 2009?