10 ms·
Let me Duck Duck Go that for you
- asimjalis 16y agoI tried http://lmddgtfy.com/foo http://lmddgtfy.com/foo and I got this message: Unhandled Exception An unhandled exception was thrown by the application.
- simonk 16y agoIt looks like the URL should be http://lmddgtfy.com/?q=foo&v= http://lmddgtfy.com/?q=foo&v= Although, yes a lot easier to remember your way.
- asimjalis 16y agoTrue. Still an unhandled exception does not sound good.
- stcredzero 16y agoThat's the message VisualWorks Smalltalk uses to notify users of an exception.
- mattmaroon 16y agoOr they could just change their name to something people would take seriously. Just a thought.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- roc 16y ago... because the search engine market has so long been dominated by serious-sounding firms?
- gnoupi 16y agoThe search engine market started before all the "serious people" started coming to the Internet, I think. I think it is harder nowadays to make a fame with a name like this.
- NathanKP 16y agoThe internet hasn't become any more serious recently. People are still using it for non-serious things (lolcats, 4chan, Reddit, etc) so a non-serious search engine can still attract people, I think.
- PostOnce 16y agoJerry Yang calls himself the "Chief Yahoo", and that is about as unserious as it gets. Windows Live Search changed its name to something less serious to be more appealing to the public. I mean, really, Bing? How serious is that? Ask.com is about the most sensibly-named search engine. I mean, what do you do with a search engine? You ask it things. That hasn't really helped them corner the market, exactly. I am ranting. I should go to bed.
- Legion 16y agoMy first reaction was to agree with your point. But I wonder if there are varying levels of non-seriousness. Names like Google and Yahoo definitely aren't serious, but they also have a sort of generic quality. Not in a bad sense, I just mean they don't evoke a specific silly image in my head - at least not by themselves (when I think Yahoo, I see a big purple !, but that's by marketing design). Duck Duck Go, though, doesn't have that same nebulous quality. There's something more concrete there, and more specific imagery that comes to mind. And I think that's why someone might react that way to the name and not to the names Google or Yahoo or Bing. It's less vague, and decidedly more Saturday morning cartoon. Is that bad? I don't know, it doesn't necessarily bother me. But I understand why some people view it differently than the search engine names already out there.
- mattmaroon 16y agoThat's my exact thought. Google and Yahoo! come off as genuinely irreverent and fun (but, importantly, not childish). It's like something you'd expect a couple 20-something hackers to name their product. Duck Duck Go comes off as the 50 yr old guy who yells "'Fo Shizzle!" and holds his hand out for a fist bump. It's something you'd expect from an older guy trying to pretend to be a 20something hacker. It thus comes off as insincere.
- iamwil 16y agoGoogle was a silly name for a while, and what do we think of it now? Here, I'll invoke "Tara" "The less confident you are, the more serious you have to act." - Tara Ploughman
- cookiecaper 16y agoWell, "Google" rolls off the tongue much easier than "Duck Duck Go". "Duck Duck Go" is also hard to "verb", as it were. I don't have a problem with the mentioned silliness of the name, I just think it's too long and hard to say/write.
- epi0Bauqu 16y agoDuck it! Working on shorter domain names...we have dukgo, though that isn't that memorable. I hope to have something soon though.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- axod 16y agoI'd say get something that you can easily say, spell, and use as a verb. bloip gibbit erdle jopple etc etc But rebranding does seem a big job to me. It's amazingly motivating when you start seeing your startups name appearing as a verb on twitter searches :)
- mattmaroon 16y agoRebranding is not too difficult if you don't get much traffic from organic search. It's a simple redirect and a notice on the page. It's also not too difficult when you're small but gets more costly as time goes on. If DDG succeeds, the customer base it has now will be something like .00001% of it's users.
- anonjon 16y agoduckify! (?)
- icey 16y agoI think it's a matter of taste. A few people I've told about duckduckgo have mentioned it "sounded like a search engine's name" after I said that I thought the name wasn't that great.
- mburney 16y agoActually the only reason I started using duck duck go is because the name sounds cool.
- Hoff 16y agoPick some topic areas that are popular with some subset of the population. There are various groups that would welcome having certain search terms dropped from the indices and others that they favor weighted more highly, for instance. There are any number of ways to go to cater to specific search audiences. Start up multiple parallel DDG analogs of Google's Blackle <http://www.blackle.com> http://www.blackle.com> site, for instance. For the business folks, call it PinstripeSearch or PrivateSearch or something suitable for the target audience. Graft a different presentation with conservative fonts and typography and tweak the search index ratings for the audience, and off you go. There are any number of audiences for specific searches. Yeah, the indexes get huge. But then you also get to cater to and advertise to specific audiences.
- arethuza 16y agoWell, for what it is worth, I rather like the name. Memorable, easy to spell and with the right amount of humor.
- tomkinstinch 16y agoRegardless of any meaning associated with it or how serious it sounds, "DuckDuckGo" takes a while to type...
- pbhjpbhj 16y agoHe has dukgo.com as a short redirect.
- tomkinstinch 16y agoGreat, thanks for the tip!
- po 16y agoWhen I saw the title of this HN post "Let me Duck Duck Go that for you" and clicked on it, I was expecting a blog posting about how why DDG doesn't have an easy enough name to ever catch on. I actually like the sillyness of the name but I'm not that fond of the name/logo of Duck Duck Go. I think it reminds me too much of Aflac.
- Keyframe 16y agoduckhunt is already taken!
- asimjalis 16y agoI am curious. Is DDG running their own web crawlers or are they a front-end to search results from some other engine?
- epi0Bauqu 16y agoBoth.
- epi0Bauqu 16y agoStuff like this keeps me super-motivated. Thx Mike for making it!
- lappie 16y agoI think ddg is a great initiative and like how you are going about it. I have been following ddg quite a bit and also on the reddit ads/postings. With a slightly long term view and clear focus I think it has a decent chance to compete with the big guys. Having said that, there are two things I noticed which I don't completely agree with. 1. The interface - the fonts, layout on the first page somehow is very unreadable. I am not sure what the motivation behind this is, but imho even a copy of hte exact google serp fonts/layout should have been good enough. The only way ddg will stand out from Google is the quality of data on your serp. There is very little incremental innovation possible from the layout that Google already has for listing a list of links and text, and it also doesnt seem to be your focus anyways. 2. I think the auto extension of search results is a bad interface choice. A pagination interface provides a clear anchoring and also for most people the first 10 results are more than enough - anything more and the information becomes too overwhelming. Again I dont think this provides any more value from the Google interface and is bad from a cognitive overload viewpoint. Just my two cents. Best of luck on ddg.
- nfnaaron 16y agoSubjectively disagree on point 1, I like reading DDG SERPs. Subjectively agree on point 2, I find it a little disorienting not to be anchored to a page in the result set. DDG is my default searchbar site.
- ianium 16y agoSubjectively agree with 1. I find that each result doesn't seem separate enough, as if it was just a bunch of text and not individual results. Subjectively and strongly disagree with 2. I love being able to just scroll down to the second page of results, it saves a few clicks and lets me scroll quickly through a bunch of results so I can quickly gauge the quality of the search terms.
- gnoupi 16y agoOh, great, one more condescending way to answer people when you are too lazy to provide a real answer but want to be """funny""". Yay. Seriously, if you are concerned that someone didn't make an appropriate search on Internet before asking for information, there are nicer ways to suggest that than that kind of sites.
- cookiecaper 16y agoLMGTFY is just a tool -- it can be used in good humor or malice. This site, likewise, but it has the added benefit of promoting DuckDuckGo and producing brand exposure, and is therefore less likely to be taken as a slight; with LMGTFY, everyone knows what Google is, so they don't take that as an informative thing; with LMDDGTFY, few people know what DDG is, so they may just assume that the linker is humorously and conveniently promoting a new search engine out of personal preference.
- gnoupi 16y agoI see the interest in promoting DDG, but the "let me take your hand and do that for you" is and will always be a bit condescending. You can tell about a great search engine without that kind of approach, in my opinion. Because if your intention is good, this way is hardly the best, I think. Most will use it like others used lmgtfy, or a more strict "RTFM", years ago: as a "search yourself noob" end of discussion.
- eli 16y agoI kinda disagree. There's a difference between saying "search yourself" and "search for yourself using these keywords" And depending on context, some people really do need to be shown that they can type keywords into the search box like so in order to get results like these.
- shimonamit 16y agoI wonder how they plan to monetize this...
- epi0Bauqu 16y agoIt's fun. Why does everything have to be monetized?
- igorgue 16y agoSome users take the "Hacker" out of "HackerNews" :-)
- shimonamit 16y agoI was just having fun... hope nobody took it seriously. It is a goofy site and a goofy comment.
- ippisl 16y agoIf you're not really devoted to monetizing it , you might be able to compete with google on ad quality. google's really into getting maximum money , so many times the ads suck. You, on the other hand , could offer the most helpfull ads.i'm thinking of something like showing the disruptive companies for a service your looking for. for example , let's say you're looking for a divorce lawyer. one option to save a lot of money is using an expert system software to generate the required papers. most people don't know about this option, probably because real lawyers outbid them in the ad market. So knowing about the expert system option is very useful. Of course , you don't have to show only disruptive ads , but an ad combination that offer the best knowledge for the user. Now , if there's a way to make this scalable across many product types, you have a very powerful feature, one that the big search engines would find very hard to imitate, because it would hurt their profits.
- helwr 16y agoLinkedin profiles with 500+ connections are still not at the top when searching for people names, some junk pages somehow get higher rank
- epi0Bauqu 16y agoThis isn't true across the board, e.g. http://duckduckgo.com/?q=gabriel+weinberg http://duckduckgo.com/?q=gabriel+weinberg In any case though, I'm happy to fix if you give me some specific examples to work with.
- resdirector 16y agoQuick question: what types of searches are better done through DDG than Google? I've tried a few searches, but haven't found DDG better than Google...is DDG superior only for certain types of searches?
- jodrellblank 16y agoIf you search for the MD5 hash of an email address, DDG finds them on Disqus (if they exist there) and Google doesn't. Only one I've actually noticed ;)
- epi0Bauqu 16y agoYou can also md5 an email http://duckduckgo.com/?q=md5+yegg%40alum.mit.edu http://duckduckgo.com/?q=md5+yegg%40alum.mit.edu :). More goodies at http://duckduckgo.com/goodies.html http://duckduckgo.com/goodies.html & http://duckduckgo.com/bang.html http://duckduckgo.com/bang.html
- epi0Bauqu 16y agohttp://duckduckgo.com/about.html http://duckduckgo.com/about.html Of course it is subjective, but it really should be better across a wide swatch of searches. I think it is most clear though on what is X searches. The information view (from the home page) goes even further on these type of searches and grabs topic summaries in real time. Other areas where I think we do noticeably better on average are with names and long un-quoted searches (5+ words). Of course you can find counter-examples everywhere... What I always suggest to people is to give it a week as your primary search engine. If you (or anyone) do/does, I'd really appreciate you getting back to me with your feedback.
- stcredzero 16y agoI think of DuckDuckGo as a "budget airline" sort of search engine. It seems to be best at handling the "low hanging fruit" or the common case, but it does so with better presentation, more convenience, and no bells and whistles. By contrast, Wolfram Alpha is more like an arctic bush pilot. Or maybe that's Cuil?
- jacquesm 16y ago> Or maybe that's Cuil? I think you mean 'cpedia'.
- stcredzero 16y agoYou are correct.
- vaksel 16y agoSomeone should make one of those blind experiments where you pull in the search results from yahoo, bing, google and DDG, so people can do a blind test to see which search engine is better
- eru 16y agoAlready happened. People seemed to have preferred the bing search results, and the Google-looking page. Perhaps somebody can even find the reference for this?
- epi0Bauqu 16y agoGoogle must have disagreed since they just made their page layout look more like Bings.
- eru 16y agoIt's probably the Google brand that people like more than the actual layout.
- nostrademons 16y agoNope, they preferred the Google results: http://techcrunch.com/2009/08/08/which-search-engine-do-you-choose-in-the-blind-test/ http://techcrunch.com/2009/08/08/which-search-engine-do-you-...
- eru 16y agoI probably saw an earlier tally: http://www.istartedsomething.com/20090607/bing-vs-google-vs-yahoo-blind-search-engine-test/ http://www.istartedsomething.com/20090607/bing-vs-google-vs-...
- epi0Bauqu 16y agoA lot of DDG results look fundamentally different and so wouldn't work in a blind test.
- heyitsnick 16y agohttp://duckduckgo.com/?q=lmddgtfy&v= http://duckduckgo.com/?q=lmddgtfy&v=
- varjag 16y agohttp://lmddgtfy.com/?q=%D0%B0%D0%B6+%D0%B4%D0%B2%D0%B0+%D1%80%D0%B0%D0%B7%D0%B0&v=i http://lmddgtfy.com/?q=%D0%B0%D0%B6+%D0%B4%D0%B2%D0%B0+%D1%8... and http://lmddgtfy.com/?q=%E4%BD%A0%E5%A5%BD+&v=i http://lmddgtfy.com/?q=%E4%BD%A0%E5%A5%BD+&v=i throw an unhandled exception. Seems like non-Latin character sets give it bad vibe.
- RyanMcGreal 16y agoReturns a server error when the DuckDuckGo page loads: ---- Server Error The following error occurred: [code=CACHE_FILL_OPEN_FILE] An internal error prevented the object from being sent to the client and cached. Try again later. Please contact the administrator. \ ---- http://duckduckgo.com/?q=test&v= http://duckduckgo.com/?q=test&v=
- antirez 16y agoUsing DDG as a replacement for Google in the latest two months. I'm impressed. If it's better or not than google for certain types of usage, I'll let other users to decide (but it is better, for my usage). But what is truly impressive is how this guy build a search engine that works in a way that is comparable to Google for the end user, with limited resources.
- moultano 16y agoWhat percentage of duckduckgo's queries have results different from the bing/yahoo on which it is based? Don't mean to rain on anyone's parade here, but usually when I use it the results are identical to bing's.
- Volt 16y agoI find that Google gives me better results when it matters. So although DDG has been my primary search engine, there are times when I'll enter my query into Google and get something that better satisfies my information need as either the first or second result, whereas I might have to look further down the list on DDG. That said, I do love DDG, and it's still my primary search engine after 2 months as well. I switched based on the privacy policy (no personally identifiable information retained), ability to use HTTPS, and the nice infinite scrolling implementation, and unless these things change I'll certainly continue to use it. The combination of these, plus the generally impressive quality of the search results, make it really great. Kinda solidifies the notion that you can compete on more than just the content of the search results list.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- arst 16y agohttp://lmddgtfy.com/?q=let+me+google+this+for+you&v= http://lmddgtfy.com/?q=let+me+google+this+for+you&v=
- natep 16y agoSharing the link is really hard (at least for me, maybe I'm doing it wrong?). When I type something and click search, it takes me straight to the page I'd want to send someone, and I can't really select the url (because of whatever's moving the pointer?). So, do I just have to figure out the url scheme and write it out myself? lmgtfy just gives you the url to send someone.
- arst 16y agoIt doesn't actually move your cursor, just an image of a cursor. You should be able to copy & paste the URL out of your address bar as it is animating; you're right that just showing the URL after the user clicks 'Search' might be more user friendly, though.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- motters 16y agoI Duck Duck Went a couple of months ago, and have been going ever since.
- blueben 16y agoIs DDG engaging in some sort of grassroots campaign to make sure they get a link on HN at least a few times a month? I get it. DDG is out there. They're an alternative to Google. Great. How about some articles with merit rather than yet-another-link to the search engine front page and a bunch of people gushing about it?
- tsally 16y agoIn order to be qualified to make these sorts of comments, you either need to either (A) submit high quality links or (B) create something front-page worthy. Your last submission (out of a total of 3) was 59 days ago. And I don't see any links to projects in your profile. So pretty much all you're doing here is being negative; you're not taking any action to correct this quality "problem" that you perceive. DDG is an entire search engine coded by one dude in Perl. And it's pretty good too. I personally don't mind if it gets some time on the front page, even if just for the discussion.
- Terretta 16y ago> DDG is an entire search engine coded by one dude in Perl. DDG FAQ: Q. How do you get your results? A. From many sources, including DuckDuckBot, crowd-sourced sites, BOSS & Bing. E.g., see http://developer.yahoo.com/search/boss/ http://developer.yahoo.com/search/boss/ ... BOSS (Build your Own Search Service) is Yahoo!'s open search web services platform. Developers, start-ups, and large Internet companies can use BOSS to build and launch web-scale search products that utilize the entire Yahoo! Search index. BOSS (Build your Own Search Service) is a truly open API with as few rules and limitations as possible. With BOSS, developers and start-ups now have the technology and infrastructure to build next generation search solutions that can compete head-to-head with the principals in the search industry.
- epi0Bauqu 16y agoNope. I didn't make this and I didn't know the person who did. Nor did I submit it.
- 16y ago
- senko 16y agoCrashes on non-ascii input. Example (query is "rašić" in utf-8): http://lmddgtfy.com/?q=ra%C5%A1i%C4%87&v= http://lmddgtfy.com/?q=ra%C5%A1i%C4%87&v=
- blahedo 16y agoIn the early days of Google, back while it was still beta, I remember having to go to my backup search engine—remember Altavista? :)—for queries where I just needed a boatload of sites, or where I had a complex boolean thing, or where I needed to search for a whole phrase. Of course, back in the 90s Google knocked out my reasons to backoff to Altavista, one by one, adding boolean queries, and phrases, and of course adding a boondle of data. So I was eventually able to stop using Altavista. For the last few months, DDG is my primary and I love it. I still use Google for: * a few queries that DDG can't find anything for * to find out what other people will see when they "google it" * YouTube and maps. YouTube will be hard to ditch because that's where the content is, although I suspect I can wean from maps if I actually try.