8 ms·

DuckDuckGo launches Search & Stories app

140 points by Titanous 13y ago

d0m 13y ago
I'm a bit confused about the "Stories". What does it mean? Is it articles? Blog posts?
- MikeCapone 13y ago
  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?
- cainetighe 13y ago
  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.
  - cinquemb 13y ago
    >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/ http://dontbubble.us/
    - cainetighe 13y ago
      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.
      - LaGrange 13y ago
        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.
      - Ziomislaw 13y ago
        but, but, but... this _IS_ the definition of a filter bubble
  - jffry 13y ago
    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.
- flippyhead 13y ago
  I was also confused.
k-mcgrady 13y ago
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.
lgray 13y ago
Is this news? I downloaded it a few days ago. When did it launch?
- k-mcgrady 13y ago
  The current version was launched today according to the info on the Play store.
awesomifier 13y ago
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!
pearjuice 13y ago
DDG might be fresh, safe and secure and have nice features; its search is still very, very weak.
- a1a 13y ago
  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.
  - nfoz 13y ago
    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.
    - a1a 13y ago
      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.
      - claudius 13y ago
        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.
landhar 13y ago
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!
nemoniac 13y ago
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?
- cainetighe 13y ago
  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.
  - MikeCapone 13y ago
    Is there an iPad version of the app planned?
    - yegg 13y ago
      Yes indeed!
  - johnrob 13y ago
    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?
    - yegg 13y ago
      It has a long history, starting even before DuckDuckGo. https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=watrcoolr https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=watrcoolr Perhaps I should do a post on it on the DDG blog.
      - nemoniac 13y ago
Sami_Lehtinen 13y ago
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.)
akavlie 13y ago
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.
- gojomo 13y ago
  I'm curious too. But maybe a good licensing-aware image search facility can auto-match acceptable images to stories?
hkmurakami 13y ago
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?
- oneof11111 13y ago
  yep. install the app. google now should give you two options. select and set as default...
znowi 13y ago
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 :)
alekseyk 13y ago
I don't understand one thing, if you are worried about 'privacy' why not just use a simple proxy and go to Google? I'm sure there is a web site that simply fetches Google results on your behalf without sharing information with Google.
dhruvbird 13y ago
This is neat! :)
exodust 13y ago
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.
mikiem 13y ago
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!
chj 13y ago
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.
- jabbernotty 13y ago
  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 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuckDuckGo#Features
  - chj 13y ago
    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.
    - jabbernotty 13y ago
      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.
ciderpunx 13y ago
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.
ddgtest 13y ago
Does this app use SSL?

140 points by Titanous 13y ago

d0m 13y ago

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

MikeCapone 13y ago
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?
cainetighe 13y ago
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.
- cinquemb 13y ago
  >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/ http://dontbubble.us/
  - cainetighe 13y ago
    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.
    - LaGrange 13y ago
      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.
    - Ziomislaw 13y ago
      but, but, but... this _IS_ the definition of a filter bubble
- jffry 13y ago
  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.
flippyhead 13y ago
I was also confused.

k-mcgrady 13y ago

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.

lgray 13y ago

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

k-mcgrady 13y ago
The current version was launched today according to the info on the Play store.

awesomifier 13y ago

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!

pearjuice 13y ago

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

a1a 13y ago
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.
- nfoz 13y ago
  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.
  - a1a 13y ago
    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.
    - claudius 13y ago
      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.

landhar 13y ago

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!

nemoniac 13y ago

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?

cainetighe 13y ago
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.
- MikeCapone 13y ago
  Is there an iPad version of the app planned?
  - yegg 13y ago
    Yes indeed!
- johnrob 13y ago
  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?
  - yegg 13y ago
    It has a long history, starting even before DuckDuckGo. https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=watrcoolr https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=watrcoolr Perhaps I should do a post on it on the DDG blog.
    - nemoniac 13y ago

Sami_Lehtinen 13y ago

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.)

akavlie 13y ago

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.

gojomo 13y ago
I'm curious too. But maybe a good licensing-aware image search facility can auto-match acceptable images to stories?

hkmurakami 13y ago

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?

oneof11111 13y ago
yep. install the app. google now should give you two options. select and set as default...

znowi 13y ago

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 :)

alekseyk 13y ago

I don't understand one thing, if you are worried about 'privacy' why not just use a simple proxy and go to Google? I'm sure there is a web site that simply fetches Google results on your behalf without sharing information with Google.

dhruvbird 13y ago

This is neat! :)

exodust 13y ago

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.

mikiem 13y ago

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!

chj 13y ago

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.

jabbernotty 13y ago
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 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuckDuckGo#Features
- chj 13y ago
  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.
  - jabbernotty 13y ago
    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.

ciderpunx 13y ago

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.

ddgtest 13y ago

Does this app use SSL?