I'm quite surprised at the amount of vitriol for DDG in the comments here. I switched many months ago -- probably nearing a year now -- and haven't looked back.
I definitely appreciate the effort that has been put into privacy and simplicity. The zero-click box has come in handy at times (though I often find myself clicking through the box anyway, in which case it's a glorified top result, and that's okay with me). My most used feature by far, though, has been the bang syntax, to reference the Java API or search HN or check Stack Overflow or pull up a Google map or explore Wikipedia. I think the bang syntax experience might be frustrating for people who navigate to DDG and then type in a bang query... but if you've got DDG set as your browser's default search, the bang syntax is a nice timesaver: open a new tab (autofocus into the URL bar), type in your site-targeted query, hit Enter, done. I save one page load every time I do a site-specific search, compared to what my experience would be on any other search engine, and considering the proportion of my browser time spent in searches, I think that's a decent amount of time saved. [I mean, there are people on HN who quibble over how many keystrokes they can save in their terminal aliases, after all!]
That doesn't mean I think DDG is perfect; my major annoyance is results from content farms (same as any major search engine), but I'm hard pressed to find a search engine that weeds out content farms without sacrificing the features I like from DDG. The name doesn't roll as trippingly off the tongue as some other sites, but is it really that much worse than any of the other search engines (or names of YC companies, for that matter) and does the name affect my ability to use the site?
As you hyperbolically express your disgust towards DDG, please remember that you don't get any points in life for hating a product that you aren't forced to use and that other people find helpful.
Just look at the contents of the front page. It's no longer Hacker News, it's mainstream Tech News with a bit of nerdy sprinkle. The older audience is heavily diluted with those who push pseudo-tech cruft (like a woman suing a VC) to the front page, the same people who also comment more and don't really get the spirit of the board. HN is at its tipping point. I am eagerly waiting for HN2... that's assuming one hasn't been started already and kept private.
http://news.ycombinator.com/classic shows what the frontpage would look like if we only counted the votes of people who joined HN in the first year. It looks pretty much the same.
I just want to say, I don't respect this sort of lazy elitism.
We all talk about scaling our companies, or scaling our technical systems, but when it comes to scaling a social system, are we really just going to throw in the towel and point fingers like we're in junior high?
We can do better than that. It's a hard problem, but isn't that what we're here for? Come up with a solution and quit whining.
Perhaps HN is at the tipping point that killed Digg? I hope not. Or at least that PG enforces his right to ban people over comments that can only be described as hash and not constructive.
Am I the only one that struggles with the name "DuckDuckGo?" The unprofessional name makes it really hard for me to want to use the service, even if it has nice targeted results that may be more relevant or higher quality than Google's. Maybe "unprofessional" is not the right adjective, but I can't find the right one. I have the same problem with "Bing" - the logo is just such an eyesore, and the marketing is so obnoxious ("Decision Engine?").
You aren't. I've seen the debate a few times on HN, and I've had it with friends who also opt to use DuckDuckGo.
It's "a bad name." It isn't evocative, it can't be (easily) made into a verb, and it lacks brevity.
I don't really like the name, but I'm oddly comforted that I can shorten it to ddg (and use http://ddg.gg). I can deal for now, but I do think it should change.
I agree that the content is what matters, but I just feel like it's a crying shame that a service like DuckDuckGo will never be taken seriously because of its name.
I think the name is the only reason I remembered it long enough after hearing about it to try it and eventually switch. I have had no issues recommending it.
I tried setting my main search engine to DuckDuckGo once.
I switched back to Google after trying to search for maps and local results. One of the really important features that Google offers me is Google Maps. Not having that kills DuckDuckGo for me, even if their normal search results were to work just as well.
Yes, but with Google, I don't have to think about that; I just type "place I'm going" (which is frequently copied & pasted, so I'm not even typing, and adding "map! " would be a separate step), and I'm done. And it's not just for maps; it's also local results, like when you search for "japanese food some place" and get a list of several places with a map and aggregated ratings. For instance, when I do "japanese food place I live" on Google, I get a bunch of relevant results with star ratings, and the best one is on top. When I do the same on DDG, I get links to several other restaurant aggregator sites like GrubHub, Yelp, Urbanspoon, and so on, plus one link to a restaurant that only lasted a few months before closing.
If I'm going to do "map! place name" in order to get map results, I might as well just use Google; DDG isn't adding anything. Google is a place where I can type "thing I'm looking for", and get, most of the time, the answer I'm looking for, while with DDG that's just not true.
Actually today DDG was totally useful. I was trying to find a result for "Marketly LLC DMCA" trying to run down the top company filing DMCA reports with Google. Google was useless. DDG got me to a Chilling Effects page. Lots of time when I use !G but today, DDG saved the day.
I've become a loyal fan of DuckDuckGo. In November of 2011, just for the heck of it, I decided to e-mail support@duckduckgo.com about an issue (the difficulty of performing academic searches). I was extremely impressed when I received a response from Gabriel Weinberg himself. I have been using DuckDuckGo exclusively ever since.
At first, I had a lot of reservations about switching and found myself using g! quite often. Then I realized that I wasn't necessary more impressed with Google results, I was just __used__ to it. For instance, I hated DDG's zero-click info sources, because I would mentally ignore it. It seemed like a waste of space. Now it's the first thing I look at when the search results show up -- and it's generally what I want.
- Somebody is trying to improve the search engine space which is too long dominated by just one party (which admittedly makes a damn good job)
What I don't like:
- I don't see any improvements
- Don't like their name
- Crappy logo
- Too long domain name (with some skills and little money, a great 4-letter dot com is a no brainer)
- The product is awkward to use: the entire UI is the #1 reason to leave and aesthetically not pleasing, too many colors (red, blue, green), no CI, favicons are distracting, screen real estate isn't used effectively, mouse over effects are distracting and feel like clumsy Web 2.0 sites in 2005 => even Bing's new interface is very much nicer
- Search results got better but seem to lack any relevance algorithm such as Google's Pagerank
- Shortcuts are nice but more some kind of an gimmick than real revolution and they are not helpful at all because people who do not use DDG regularly forget them: either they have to be displayed all the time somewhere next to the results or directly on the landing page or they have to be consistent and expressive as Google's syntax which is "site:<site_to_be_searched> query"—if this shortcuts are one of DDG's main features then they have to tell it.
- No autocomplete, no instant search
I think DDG's and the team main problem is a heavy lack of product vision—they just think search is a great business model (yes it is) and they want to do something to just be better than the market leader. And this 'something' is their biggest weakness, they just don't know what to improve, on what to focus. Google's search is so good, that it's gonna hard to improve but still there are some fields where Google can be beaten (anonymous search, irrelevant results for longer queries because of SEO gaming/blackhat). Instead they just brought up a really ugly design and the user wonders all the 15 seconds he's exploring DDG why he should use DDG.
DDG has to pick one of Google's weaknesses and focus just on this and they have also to position DDG accordingly and communicate this focus/USP heavily. Otherwise DDG is like G+ to FB, just a bad copy.
I can image how hard it must be to build a search engine from scratch, there's just too much tech involved and crawling all the web could take months even if you have hundreds of servers (imagine: Google crawls even smaller sites with more than 20,000 pages per day (!), how does anyone want to build such crawling power with little VC money and some hype posts from Fred Wilson??). But maybe that's the chance: a new player has to focus on something small—a feature, a content niche, whatever, just a MVP that is in its core much, much better than Google. Building and promising the entire Google search experience will lead to fail.
> - Too long domain name (with some skills and little money, a great 4-letter dot com is a no brainer)
They do have ddg.gg as a short alias to the full domain, though that doesn't address the .com suggestion at all. For that, they also have dukgo.com which I thought was another alias, but it appears that's being used for a community platform now.
I think it would have made more sense to reverse those two domains and have dukgo.com point to the search engine itself, and leave the more esoteric ddg.gg domain to the community platform. People invested in the platform would have an easier time remembering the "weird" domain than the general public (i.e. the folks who they need to use the search engine) would.
Regarding the UI, have you looked at the "Settings" page? Most of the UI is fully customizable -- you can change almost all of the colours you see, you can even remove many features such as the icons, sidebar, 0-click box, even the ads!
You can also adjust the layout of your results: alignment, page width, font and font size, underlining of links, etc.
Clearly they've provided a multitude of options, you just need to try them out.
Also, they do allow site search using the same syntax as Google.
Yes, but just in their logo, that's ok because the rest of Google stands behind the expressive logo, is clear, has lots of white space, decent colors etc.
Now go to DDG: read header, blue search button on result page and green search button on landing, what the heck?? Strange colors in the text results and this ugly duck, sorry but getting a really nice duck on freelancer.com or 99design from a talented artist is a job of 500 USD.
> The length of the url isn't that big of a deal to me. I just type 'du' and the first url autosuggested is duckduckgo.
No, it's a big deal even if your browser provides autocomplete, The domain is everything: their brand, their name and will used anywhere and all the time. Just saying "check duckduckgo for searching this and that" or "i duckduckgoed my name" to your friend or colleague is too much communication overhead, too many syllables for something which is too important in our lifes nowadays.
And those both points bug me, because if they haven't done their basic homework on the frontend side who tells me that they done them on the backend side where it is more important (relevance algorithm)—why should I trust DDG's search results if they are not able to setup a proper brand communcation and interface?
Google's search button is grey on the landing page and blue on the results page. Does anyone actually click the search button? Heck, does anyone actually even go to the landing page? I don't think I've ever actually used DDG's landing page, I just use the Chrome address bar...
I do see improvements. I often see information captured from the top result and displayed in the box at the top of the search. I've had better results on ddg on numerous occasions.
nice summary of shortcomings. but for me the biggest one is missing: highly special search queries (yesterday: about erlang, rebar and obscure release building failures) return virtually no usable results. google was way better.
somehow related, i like that they include links to google below their search results.
The question I have is as to their business model.
There's a saying--- if you aren't buying a product, you are the product. So they have one paid link per page. Is that enough to make them profitable eventually?
I don't see why not. Their costs are probably minimal (some servers + salaries). Beyond that they're just leveraging all the work of Bing and others. Also, they've taken barely any VC money, so it's not like there's a huge return expected in the first place.
DuckDuckGo has a tasteless name, tasteless logo, and awful webdesign. That alone is enough for me not to switch.
I believe the idea of integrating and presenting results from various specialized sources has a bright future in search, but DDG doesn't handle it very well right now. It might be in the future Google will leverage the same logic to improve its search experience. Google's "Knowledge graph" seems to me to be a step in that direction.
And when Google does it, chances are that it will outperform years of DDG's effort in mere weeks.
It looks like a cheap knock-off of Google and doesn't give me the hit count for "Ubuntu" (or I missed it). Google gives me over 200 million, Bing over 44 million.
How is that in any way a useful statistic? Who cares about 200+ million results vs. 44 million? Most people don't look at the fifth result, let alone the 200 millionth one. What matters is the first page and whether those top results are the best and most relevant for a given query.
It's useful to me, I've looked at it for over a decade, I want to get a good feeling that my search engine is doing everything it can to scour the Internet and is not filtering my search results out, they prioritize and that's cool.
>> Google gives me over 200 million, Bing over 44 million.
Is that relevant to your evaluation of a search engine? I don't care how many hits the engine shows, just what it shows in the first 3 links or so. The rest is noise.
Just so you know, at least Google's hit count is usually off by several orders of magnitude. It's comforting to see it, but it's almost entirely inaccurate.
As far as I know DDG uses mainly the BOSS API. When I tested the BOSS API for http://kligl.com I found that the reported result count was consistently lower for BOSS compared with the (still) free Bing API, even though the underlying data is the same. That's probably why it is not reported on DDG.
Both only give you the first 1000 results max so it makes no difference in practice.
I've never seen someone describe a middleman so enthusiastically.
Not that there isn't enormous added value in presentation or that duckduckgo has a poor offering at all - but your search result quality will always be limited to that of your partner-competitors' (Bing index in this case). And the more you succeed, the more expensive your partnership grows: see Netflix.
Wait a minute. I just remembered the other added value: privacy. Now that I think about it, I know a few middlemen/middlewomen that I'd describe enthusiastically myself!
Keep in mind quite a few people have done this before, bitcircle, 4hoursearch etc... spring to mind but DDG has actually done some innovations in the space and is still around. The fact that people know it will still be around next year encourages you to at least play with it.
I'm so sick of these DDG stories. The truth is no one uses them, 99.9999% of people outside SV have never heard of them and currently there is no reason to switch to them.
My dad came to me just the other day and told me he didn't like the stories about Google recording every page he searched for, so I told him to use DDG. Heck if I know how big the market is, but if my parents care without me telling them, it has a better chance than most of the startups I hear about on Hacker News.
Sheesh. This was true of Google in the late 1990s when I was telling my coworkers to use it. If everyone listened to people like you then we'd be using Yahoo! and Altavista today.
DDG is better for some people. I use it and haven't missed Google yet. There are some things I need Google for (!m gives me a map for example) and some things I prefer Google for (I use G+), but for general search DDG is a better experience for me.
Really, why did anyone ever switch from Yahoo? It wasn't for the results, Google provided the search results for Yahoo for awhile. Many people, myself included, switched to Google for the clean interface.
Now I've switched to DDG not just for the results (which are 95% "just as good") but for the privacy, the variety (I like the idea of competing services), and some of the interesting things DDG is doing with providing information directly.
As I've said before, search is an intensely personal tool. Don't use a tool if you don't like it, but recognize that other people might like a tool even if you think it's terrible.
The thing I don't understand is, for all that DDG does, there's really nothing that Google and/or Bing couldn't just copy wholesale if it were really that great.
The ONLY thing DuckDuckGo can do that Google won't is "privacy" (maybe "less ads" is another thing). While that might be reason enough for some people to switch, it's barely going to make a dent in Google's dominance.
Reading all these comments made me wonder... If DDG uses the Bing API and is passing the search term to whatever search-related text ads they show, that's a pretty big blind spot for the privacy advocates. Because Bing still gets your search term and so does the ad network. What they don't get is your IP address, but as the AOL search dump proved, sometimes search terms alone are enough to identify someone. It's still a nice feature, but I wouldn't consider it a solved issue.
Bing gets everyone's search terms merged together, with no way to distinguish individual users. To Bing, it looks like one user doing a bajillion searches on all manner of topics.
In the AOL case, while IP addresses were stripped, users were identified with unique keys so you could see individual users' search sequences. That is not the case here.
I switched. For 80-90% of my queries it gets me to the same place as Google just as quickly, or more quickly in some cases. For the other 10-20% there's the !bang syntax, which also lets me search images and maps right from the Chrome address bar without ever hitting the mouse.
Use the tools that make you most productive. For me, that's DDG. For you, maybe not. But I think "...there is no reason to switch to them" just isn't accurate in general.
Unfortunately for me, the most used !bang function was "!g" to re-run the search on Google. I used DDG daily for months as my default search engine and on about half of all my queries (most of them technical searches), it would give poor enough results that I'd scan the page, re-run the query with "!g " and find a useful result on Google in the first or second listing.
I finally admitted to myself that I was wasting too much time having to run so many searches twice and I switched back to Google.
I haven't had that problem at all. Most of my searches are technical and I rarely have to switch to Google. I would suggest giving it another try every few months if you aren't satisfied with it.
I think that's the main issue for anyone who wants to best google.
I'm not particularly disapointed with google search, and if I try something I don't like, I won't try it again unless a friend tells me it's changed a lot.
That business is clearly one-shot, either v1 is good or you're going to have to fight uphill against a bad rep of your own making.
I was thinking of wall time, but in general the number of clicks is the same. Again, for me. YMMV.
I suspect we all tend to search for the same types of things over and over. Ruby developers search for Ruby docs and modules, stamp collectors search for auctions and information about stamps, etc.
So I fully understand that my experience won't be shared by everyone.
I don't see DDG taking Google's search crown. But it could happen the way Firefox opened the barn door - then other browsers came to take the crown (Chrome, for example).
[1] indicates DDG uses third-party APIs for deep web searches. To me that sounds like how Inktomi was a "search engine API" and neither Inktomi nor Yahoo saw Google coming [2].
Even if DDG doesn't succeed, Google is now at the top of the hill and therefore is _the_ target for all competitors.
Last time I tried both, I liked Blekko a lot more than DDG. So unless the "don't let ads track me" becomes a huge issue - like 100x bigger than it is now - I doubt people will be switching from Google to DDG.
I recently almost completely stopped using youtube. Then I downloaded adblock video plugin - was using firefox at that time.
Ads can be a major pain, and any business that requires them is probably going to fail, intolerance to ads is building up as ads are more and more agressive.
Switching to DDG because of ads wouldn't make much sense, they'll get their own ads when they have to pay for servers, too.
I don't think DDG needs to take anybody's crown to be successful. It provides a service to a few niches, mainly the tinfoil hat types and to people who mostly use Google as an intermediary to find wikipedia articles or posts on stack overflow and want a low-friction alternative. Or there's me: I mainly prefer the keyboard shortcuts.
Anyway, my point is that 1% of the search market is about half a billion dollars in revenue.
It'll be interesting to see if Gabriel keeps up with the affiliate model or moves toward an in-house ad solution.
No.. That's a common misconception. 1% of search market is not 1% of revenue because companies won't spend any time and investment in places with little traffic.
Bing is 20% of search market yet last I checked they are nowhere near that amount in revenue
DDG offers privacy, something that Google and other big search engines do not. That is more than enough reason- especially with growing privacy concerns in the US.
I definitely appreciate the effort that has been put into privacy and simplicity. The zero-click box has come in handy at times (though I often find myself clicking through the box anyway, in which case it's a glorified top result, and that's okay with me). My most used feature by far, though, has been the bang syntax, to reference the Java API or search HN or check Stack Overflow or pull up a Google map or explore Wikipedia. I think the bang syntax experience might be frustrating for people who navigate to DDG and then type in a bang query... but if you've got DDG set as your browser's default search, the bang syntax is a nice timesaver: open a new tab (autofocus into the URL bar), type in your site-targeted query, hit Enter, done. I save one page load every time I do a site-specific search, compared to what my experience would be on any other search engine, and considering the proportion of my browser time spent in searches, I think that's a decent amount of time saved. [I mean, there are people on HN who quibble over how many keystrokes they can save in their terminal aliases, after all!]
That doesn't mean I think DDG is perfect; my major annoyance is results from content farms (same as any major search engine), but I'm hard pressed to find a search engine that weeds out content farms without sacrificing the features I like from DDG. The name doesn't roll as trippingly off the tongue as some other sites, but is it really that much worse than any of the other search engines (or names of YC companies, for that matter) and does the name affect my ability to use the site?
As you hyperbolically express your disgust towards DDG, please remember that you don't get any points in life for hating a product that you aren't forced to use and that other people find helpful.