6 ms·

Duck duck go!

65 points by setori88 17y ago

setori88 17y ago
my default search engine
- baddox 17y ago
  Same.
  - blueben 17y ago
    I am curious. What's the benefit?
    - setori88 17y ago
      just use it for a week and you will see the benefit (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1209384 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1209384)
      - blueben 17y ago
        Two questions: Are you an employee, investor, or other interested party? Is there not one good benefit of this search engine that you can put in to words?
        dcurtis 17y ago
        Just use it for a week, and you'll see. For many things, the results are better than Google. (And it's not just the results, but the way they're presented.)
        setori88 17y ago
        My only relationship to duck duck go is as a user. nothing else. second question -> I know full well my words could have absolutely no effect in persuading you, as search is such a personal and habitual experience. So instead I resort to simply saying; use it for a week and let the site speak for itself. Pardon my deliberate canny dodge. anyway after a bit of a rant here is what i consider the most powerful feature of ddg: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1209619 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1209619
        pbhjpbhj 17y ago
        I actually did use it for a week but I'm back at Google. There wasn't enough draw to pull me away - though I'll try it again in a few weeks when the owner has had time to respond fully to the reddit feedback. I think he's going to be a very wealthy man!
        blueben 17y ago
        That doesn't make any sense. I'm asking to be persuaded. Obviously I'm looking for your words. Asking me to invest a week of my search traffic just because? That's more likely to have absolutely no effect in persuading me.
        setori88 17y ago
        Remember, I simply posted the duck duck go site and said this is my default search engine, why persuade you? Research yourself, can't be bothered well, so be it. Try it for a week don't like it ... so be it. Good luck mate The internet has too many trolls - not that you are a troll
        RevRal 17y ago
        >Is there not one good benefit of this search engine that you can put in to words? It has a duck. Just use it for a week.
        viraptor 17y ago
        That's not even an answer... For me it doesn't have any benefit (it hasn't got my google search profile), but I'm also interested in what benefit do you see in it. Even just because I'm curious...
        sage_joch 17y ago
        DDG wins hands down with respect to privacy.
        viraptor 17y ago
        TBH, I don't want/need DDG's privacy. I'm working with VoIP - what I want to get when I look for "yate" is the softswitch, not the city. When I look for "asterisk", I want the pbx, not the page about "*". I'm ok with google knowing that - it's search profile works great for me. I think we've got too many words with multiple meanings to accept the same results page for every person.
        setori88 17y ago
        The word "asterisk" does indeed have different meanings that is why ddg uses this particular technique to disambiguate the query. Narrowing down the meaning is performed by the user's intelligence not machine intelligence. There on the first page one can see high level "asterisk" meanings including Asterisk PBX, one click away. Please note too that Asterisk the PBX is indeed top of the weblinks section. Compare the usability to google search. Notice that a person searching for the song "Asterisk" by M83 can find it immediately on ddg. A google user would have to try different keyword combinations to eventually get the topic in question - say "what was the band's name again?" and you are off on a wild goose chase. In all honesty I would rather click that disambiguate menu than have to retype a whole bunch of search terms. Secondly your "yate" query is in fact the first weblink result of ddg (http://yate.null.ro/pmwiki/ http://yate.null.ro/pmwiki/), the other top bits help the user disambiguate the search as there are other meanings to the name Yate. A possible reason Yate the softswitch does not show up on the disambiguate menu, could be the same reason why Yate softswitch does not show up on a disambiguate menu in Wikipedia. If you create a well written wikipedia entry, I believe your softswitch would appear shortly in ddg disambiguate menu. It seems the only like to the Yate softswitch from wikipedia is this link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jingle_(protocol) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jingle_(protocol) As an experiment, try find those little Yate towns with the keyword "Yate" and the song Asterisk by the band M83 with the keyword "asterisk" in google. How about one more thing: search for Asterisk in ddg, click on the disambiguate link for asterisk and notice that the results filter out non Asterisk PBX results. Quite handy if you are an Asterisk PBX professional.
      - deleted 17y ago
        [deleted]
    - epi0Bauqu 17y ago
      Our about page is now dedicated to this quesiton: http://duckduckgo.com/about.html http://duckduckgo.com/about.html
    - baddox 17y ago
      Basically, I like the disambiguation pages and zero-click info panels. Granted, google usually has the wikipedia article for a given query in the top 5 results, but with ddg it's always right there at the top along with a paragraph of (usually relevant) the wikipedia article. I don't think it's necessarily a mind-blowing search engine (I don't know if that's even possible), but I tried it out a while back and haven't had any compelling reason to switch back to google (except for the occasional query). I've been using it for a week or two now.
viraptor 17y ago
A bit surprising that this link was not here before... Unfortunately they still don't like my developer-specific queries.
- setori88 17y ago
  I too was shocked, and am also quite shocked that this isn't shooting up with up votes. - Developer specific I would say this isn't developer specific at all - but it has very convenient !bang support for developers
- timf 17y ago
  It's been discussed quite a bit on HN: http://searchyc.com/duck+duck+go http://searchyc.com/duck+duck+go Gabriel is an active user, see his comments and submissions here: http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=epi0Bauqu http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=epi0Bauqu
  - viraptor 17y ago
    > It's been discussed quite a bit on HN That's exactly why I was surprised the main site hasn't been submitted so far. I've seen a lot of articles about it.
    - deleted 17y ago
      [deleted]
      - tptacek 17y ago
        Hacker News isn't an index of important websites.
        jpwagner 17y ago
        No, but it IS a discussion forum. Would you rather OP had posted "Ask HN: What do you think of ddg?"
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
python123 17y ago
There's no image search.
- qnrq 17y ago
  You can read about !image here: http://duckduckgo.com/bang.html http://duckduckgo.com/bang.html
jcsalterego 17y ago
But, not Hacker News, so I'm flagging.
RevRal 17y ago
I use DDG along with googlesharing (http://www.googlesharing.net http://www.googlesharing.net) for when I need to use google. This submission might end up dead, but at least it'll introduce this great search engine to some new users.
- setori88 17y ago
  well I did notice the privacy policy - duck duck go does not store ip addresses - you can also search via https if you wish.
- mapleoin 17y ago
  looks a lot like http://scroogle.org http://scroogle.org
rue 17y ago
Does the FF toolbar allow HTTPS searches now? And is the "useless page blocker" optional?
- epi0Bauqu 17y ago
  No, but I'm going to do a whole new FF add-on. You can get https search in Firefox by going to the https site and clicking 'Add to Firefox' at the bottom.
dym 17y ago
If you want a multisite search engine, check out http://startbox.org/ http://startbox.org/ -- something I hacked together a while back and still use as the start page.
- epi0Bauqu 17y ago
  Cool--any chance you'd add DDG?
- pbhjpbhj 17y ago
  That is not what I'd call a multisite search engine. It's a multisite search box submitting a query line to a button-selected SE. I was expecting something like "blindsearch", http://blindsearch.fejus.com/?q=alicious&type=web http://blindsearch.fejus.com/?q=alicious&type=web .
jpwagner 17y ago
Ok these 10 node branches are becoming a pain. It sounds like this community has some fundamental issues with privacy at google et al and is willing to sacrifice some obvious perks to relieve that. If google made it possible to do anonymous searches would google be the ideal solution? or is there something wrong with the paradigm such that alternative solutions give us a glimpse of something different and the ideal solution is really yet to be realized? I've got to point out that your average old man user clicks on the ads and doesn't care about privacy (or doesn't know anyway.)
- setori88 17y ago
  Privacy is one matter some people are deeply concerned about, especially when search terms can get you locked in prisons by governments - decent search results is another: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1209482 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1209482
dublinclontarf 17y ago
https search. If google enable https then I would be happy with that, until then, duck duck go.
- ntoshev 17y ago
  What an evil idea. Track Google searches from your corporate proxy and use some Google-trends-like analytics on these data. This would offer a glipse of your true corporate culture.
  - nailer 17y ago
    I currently get a fairly good glance at that from all the racist edits logged by Wikipedia as coming from behind my offices NAT firewall.
axod 17y ago
How did the advertising on Reddit go? Was it good value for money? Did it result in a good amount of traffic? Or was the main value in feedback from redditors? Any insight would be really valuable :)
- epi0Bauqu 17y ago
  I thought it was very valuable, and I am currently writing it up in a blog post :). I was just waiting for the #s to settle. I'll post all of the exact numbers. The short version is about 3c a click, low bounce rate, lots of feedback, users definitely sticked, and it probably helped me get on the front page of reddit the other day.
  - mixmax 17y ago
    That's great - We'll really be looking forward to hearing more and seeing some numbers. Thanks in advance for being so open about it, so the rest of us can learn from you.
  - pbhjpbhj 17y ago
    I thought he meant the AMAA thread, didn't realise you'd been using pay ads too.
Pistos2 17y ago
I gave duck duck go a chance for a while. While it was acceptable for most searches, on some searches, it just couldn't compare to Google. For example, try these queries on both: usb /dev/sda missing javascript determine font size
- setori88 17y ago
  Your point is moot, you still havn't seen the beauty of DDG. Firstly for your two queries DDG's results where acceptable, Google's was slightly better - but using this example isn't enough to shadow ddg killer feature. Lets try something else: Search Target = star shaped guitar limitation. - you may only type/search once (click/scroll as many times as you want). - you may only use one word; that being "star". Good luck with google. (im on page 23 in google and still getting star trek stuff) You might argue; I could just type "star shaped guitar" into google and it does work, but try find the song named "asterisk" when you have forgotten the band named M83 and I hope you see my point. The icing on the cake comes when you click on the star shaped guitar item in DDG and notice how it filters out non star shaped guitar results. you need to adjust the way you search, get used to surfing categories to narrow down search, dont rely on this google profile, which thinks for you.

Duck duck go!

65 points by setori88 17y ago

setori88 17y ago

my default search engine

baddox 17y ago
Same.
- blueben 17y ago
  I am curious. What's the benefit?
  - setori88 17y ago
    just use it for a week and you will see the benefit (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1209384 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1209384)
    - blueben 17y ago
      Two questions: Are you an employee, investor, or other interested party? Is there not one good benefit of this search engine that you can put in to words?
      - dcurtis 17y ago
        Just use it for a week, and you'll see. For many things, the results are better than Google. (And it's not just the results, but the way they're presented.)
      - setori88 17y ago
        My only relationship to duck duck go is as a user. nothing else. second question -> I know full well my words could have absolutely no effect in persuading you, as search is such a personal and habitual experience. So instead I resort to simply saying; use it for a week and let the site speak for itself. Pardon my deliberate canny dodge. anyway after a bit of a rant here is what i consider the most powerful feature of ddg: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1209619 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1209619
        pbhjpbhj 17y ago
        I actually did use it for a week but I'm back at Google. There wasn't enough draw to pull me away - though I'll try it again in a few weeks when the owner has had time to respond fully to the reddit feedback. I think he's going to be a very wealthy man!
        blueben 17y ago
        That doesn't make any sense. I'm asking to be persuaded. Obviously I'm looking for your words. Asking me to invest a week of my search traffic just because? That's more likely to have absolutely no effect in persuading me.
        setori88 17y ago
        Remember, I simply posted the duck duck go site and said this is my default search engine, why persuade you? Research yourself, can't be bothered well, so be it. Try it for a week don't like it ... so be it. Good luck mate The internet has too many trolls - not that you are a troll
      - RevRal 17y ago
        >Is there not one good benefit of this search engine that you can put in to words? It has a duck. Just use it for a week.
        viraptor 17y ago
        That's not even an answer... For me it doesn't have any benefit (it hasn't got my google search profile), but I'm also interested in what benefit do you see in it. Even just because I'm curious...
        sage_joch 17y ago
        DDG wins hands down with respect to privacy.
        viraptor 17y ago
        TBH, I don't want/need DDG's privacy. I'm working with VoIP - what I want to get when I look for "yate" is the softswitch, not the city. When I look for "asterisk", I want the pbx, not the page about "*". I'm ok with google knowing that - it's search profile works great for me. I think we've got too many words with multiple meanings to accept the same results page for every person.
        setori88 17y ago
        The word "asterisk" does indeed have different meanings that is why ddg uses this particular technique to disambiguate the query. Narrowing down the meaning is performed by the user's intelligence not machine intelligence. There on the first page one can see high level "asterisk" meanings including Asterisk PBX, one click away. Please note too that Asterisk the PBX is indeed top of the weblinks section. Compare the usability to google search. Notice that a person searching for the song "Asterisk" by M83 can find it immediately on ddg. A google user would have to try different keyword combinations to eventually get the topic in question - say "what was the band's name again?" and you are off on a wild goose chase. In all honesty I would rather click that disambiguate menu than have to retype a whole bunch of search terms. Secondly your "yate" query is in fact the first weblink result of ddg (http://yate.null.ro/pmwiki/ http://yate.null.ro/pmwiki/), the other top bits help the user disambiguate the search as there are other meanings to the name Yate. A possible reason Yate the softswitch does not show up on the disambiguate menu, could be the same reason why Yate softswitch does not show up on a disambiguate menu in Wikipedia. If you create a well written wikipedia entry, I believe your softswitch would appear shortly in ddg disambiguate menu. It seems the only like to the Yate softswitch from wikipedia is this link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jingle_(protocol) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jingle_(protocol) As an experiment, try find those little Yate towns with the keyword "Yate" and the song Asterisk by the band M83 with the keyword "asterisk" in google. How about one more thing: search for Asterisk in ddg, click on the disambiguate link for asterisk and notice that the results filter out non Asterisk PBX results. Quite handy if you are an Asterisk PBX professional.
    - deleted 17y ago
      [deleted]
  - epi0Bauqu 17y ago
    Our about page is now dedicated to this quesiton: http://duckduckgo.com/about.html http://duckduckgo.com/about.html
  - baddox 17y ago
    Basically, I like the disambiguation pages and zero-click info panels. Granted, google usually has the wikipedia article for a given query in the top 5 results, but with ddg it's always right there at the top along with a paragraph of (usually relevant) the wikipedia article. I don't think it's necessarily a mind-blowing search engine (I don't know if that's even possible), but I tried it out a while back and haven't had any compelling reason to switch back to google (except for the occasional query). I've been using it for a week or two now.

viraptor 17y ago

A bit surprising that this link was not here before... Unfortunately they still don't like my developer-specific queries.

setori88 17y ago
I too was shocked, and am also quite shocked that this isn't shooting up with up votes. - Developer specific I would say this isn't developer specific at all - but it has very convenient !bang support for developers
timf 17y ago
It's been discussed quite a bit on HN: http://searchyc.com/duck+duck+go http://searchyc.com/duck+duck+go Gabriel is an active user, see his comments and submissions here: http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=epi0Bauqu http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=epi0Bauqu
- viraptor 17y ago
  > It's been discussed quite a bit on HN That's exactly why I was surprised the main site hasn't been submitted so far. I've seen a lot of articles about it.
  - deleted 17y ago
    [deleted]
    - tptacek 17y ago
      Hacker News isn't an index of important websites.
      - jpwagner 17y ago
        No, but it IS a discussion forum. Would you rather OP had posted "Ask HN: What do you think of ddg?"

deleted 17y ago

[deleted]

python123 17y ago

There's no image search.

qnrq 17y ago
You can read about !image here: http://duckduckgo.com/bang.html http://duckduckgo.com/bang.html

jcsalterego 17y ago

But, not Hacker News, so I'm flagging.

RevRal 17y ago

I use DDG along with googlesharing (http://www.googlesharing.net http://www.googlesharing.net) for when I need to use google. This submission might end up dead, but at least it'll introduce this great search engine to some new users.

setori88 17y ago
well I did notice the privacy policy - duck duck go does not store ip addresses - you can also search via https if you wish.
mapleoin 17y ago
looks a lot like http://scroogle.org http://scroogle.org

rue 17y ago

Does the FF toolbar allow HTTPS searches now? And is the "useless page blocker" optional?

epi0Bauqu 17y ago
No, but I'm going to do a whole new FF add-on. You can get https search in Firefox by going to the https site and clicking 'Add to Firefox' at the bottom.

dym 17y ago

If you want a multisite search engine, check out http://startbox.org/ http://startbox.org/ -- something I hacked together a while back and still use as the start page.

epi0Bauqu 17y ago
Cool--any chance you'd add DDG?
pbhjpbhj 17y ago
That is not what I'd call a multisite search engine. It's a multisite search box submitting a query line to a button-selected SE. I was expecting something like "blindsearch", http://blindsearch.fejus.com/?q=alicious&type=web http://blindsearch.fejus.com/?q=alicious&type=web .

jpwagner 17y ago

Ok these 10 node branches are becoming a pain. It sounds like this community has some fundamental issues with privacy at google et al and is willing to sacrifice some obvious perks to relieve that. If google made it possible to do anonymous searches would google be the ideal solution? or is there something wrong with the paradigm such that alternative solutions give us a glimpse of something different and the ideal solution is really yet to be realized? I've got to point out that your average old man user clicks on the ads and doesn't care about privacy (or doesn't know anyway.)

setori88 17y ago
Privacy is one matter some people are deeply concerned about, especially when search terms can get you locked in prisons by governments - decent search results is another: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1209482 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1209482

dublinclontarf 17y ago

https search. If google enable https then I would be happy with that, until then, duck duck go.

ntoshev 17y ago
What an evil idea. Track Google searches from your corporate proxy and use some Google-trends-like analytics on these data. This would offer a glipse of your true corporate culture.
- nailer 17y ago
  I currently get a fairly good glance at that from all the racist edits logged by Wikipedia as coming from behind my offices NAT firewall.

axod 17y ago

How did the advertising on Reddit go? Was it good value for money? Did it result in a good amount of traffic? Or was the main value in feedback from redditors? Any insight would be really valuable :)

epi0Bauqu 17y ago
I thought it was very valuable, and I am currently writing it up in a blog post :). I was just waiting for the #s to settle. I'll post all of the exact numbers. The short version is about 3c a click, low bounce rate, lots of feedback, users definitely sticked, and it probably helped me get on the front page of reddit the other day.
- mixmax 17y ago
  That's great - We'll really be looking forward to hearing more and seeing some numbers. Thanks in advance for being so open about it, so the rest of us can learn from you.
- pbhjpbhj 17y ago
  I thought he meant the AMAA thread, didn't realise you'd been using pay ads too.

Pistos2 17y ago

I gave duck duck go a chance for a while. While it was acceptable for most searches, on some searches, it just couldn't compare to Google. For example, try these queries on both: usb /dev/sda missing javascript determine font size

setori88 17y ago
Your point is moot, you still havn't seen the beauty of DDG. Firstly for your two queries DDG's results where acceptable, Google's was slightly better - but using this example isn't enough to shadow ddg killer feature. Lets try something else: Search Target = star shaped guitar limitation. - you may only type/search once (click/scroll as many times as you want). - you may only use one word; that being "star". Good luck with google. (im on page 23 in google and still getting star trek stuff) You might argue; I could just type "star shaped guitar" into google and it does work, but try find the song named "asterisk" when you have forgotten the band named M83 and I hope you see my point. The icing on the cake comes when you click on the star shaped guitar item in DDG and notice how it filters out non star shaped guitar results. you need to adjust the way you search, get used to surfing categories to narrow down search, dont rely on this google profile, which thinks for you.