Using 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.
I 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.
I 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.
Thx for the detailed constructive criticism. On 1, I disagree with the premise that you can't improve UI. It's a subjective thing but I strongly believe a non-negligible % of people would prefer a different UI.
That being said, wrt to fonts and sizes, I wonder if you like any arrangement after tweaking the settings? http://duckduckgo.com/settings.html
On 2, I get way more positive feedback on this than negative, perhaps 10/1, though I do agree there are issues around the edges.
I know I've said this before, but the infinite scroll always catches me out.
I often brush on the trackpad to get to the bottom of the page. If there isn't a bottom of the page, it just freaks me out. It makes me think something's broken. Maybe I'm just an outlier though ;)
My hunch is that most of the feedback is from technicaly inclined people and most of them are expressing the 'coolness' of the infinite scroll rather than a coginitive-usability perspective. Maybe try doing a feedback round with non-technical people, possibly with something like usertesting.org. Also, the infinite scroll is a pretty old paradigm and Google would have definitely run it through its user tests, but htey obviously dont find a lot of value in it.
I agree on 1, and I think that what works well for Google & co is the strong colors. Every hit starts with blue and ends with green. You don't have to pick the same colors, but I think that's what makes it easy for me to distinguish the results.
I also think that the results start way too long down. I want to see my top three results in, well, the top.
Subjectively 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.
Been thinking of adding a setting to add a small dashed line in between results. I wonder what you think about this? If you have firebug installed, search for something then add 1px dashed #AAAAAA to .cr1 & .cr1d.
I'd recommend two other solutions before adding the dashed line.
1. Increase the contrast (could be lightness, saturation, size, or a combination of the those) between the link titles and preview text. Right now they are similar enough that when I scan the page, I see block, block, block... instead of link, link, link...(which is how I think it should read). If you look at Google or even Reddit, the links are bright enough that you can scan the link titles without noticing the preview text and/or meta info.
2. Increase the whitespace between each block to create more separation.
I think #1 is more important because link-scanning will still be a problem if you add whitespace or the dashed line. In my opinion, it's best to use spacing, alignment, and contrast to separate objects before adding new objects to act as seperators.
Thx, this is why I haven't done it to date. The link colors were actually brighter, but people kept complaining about them being too bright, which is how they got to where they are now. But I'll give that another look.
Wrt to spacing, there is actually quite a bit and I get a lot of complaints about there not being enough spacing, though I made a setting for that. I'll also revisit.
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.
I disagree -- I think they've acquired that 'nebulous quality' over time. In fact, I still think Yahoo! is a ridiculous name, and every time I hear them yodel it in a commercial it makes me cringe.
My one quibble with DuckDuckGo is that it's 3 syllables, none of which roll together. Saying the word google is fast. Saying DuckDuckGo is way less fast.
I get what you mean in that names definitely change as we get used to them.
But these names aren't created equal. "Duck" is a noun. There's a very definite, "meat-space" thing attached to that word. It's a whole lot harder to visualize a "Google" (a google of what?) than it is a duck. And what's a Bing?
I don't think there's any level of familiarity that will allow me to read Duck Duck Go and not see a duck. Again, is it a bad thing? I don't know. Maybe it's a good thing. But it is a thing, it's not just like the others.
I know what you're saying, but I disagree. Modern english is literally littered with words that originally meant entirely different things than we currently use them for. Remember 'booting up' your computer? It comes from bootstrapping, which comes from the literal straps on boots, which you put on feet. But I doubt you were thinking about feet when your computer was booting up. If Duck Duck Go becomes successful, it is not hard for me to imagine a scenario where I could say Duck Duck Go without thinking of ducks.
People still use the word boot for boots, and will use 'duck' for ducks, except when saying Duck Duck Go in which case they will think of 'that thing that replaced Google'.
That'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.
Empirically, people seem to love or hate the name, i.e. it generates an emotional response. When I talk to "normals" this love/hate ratio is very high. I understand though that you've taken issue with the name right from the beginning. This is not the first time you've shared this viewpoint :)
Ha, yeah wouldn't surprise me. I don't remember it but definitely believe you.
I think what New Coke proved though is that haters have an unduly large influence. New Coke kicked both original Coke and Pepsi's asses in blind taste tests. It's possibly bad to have something that has a love to hate ratio, even if a large one, rather than something people respect but don't care much about one way or the other.
There's some non-serious names that also aren't too nebulous, like Ask Jeeves. But I guess it's not a great example of a massive success (though it was successful enough that for a time most internet users had heard of it).
Jerry 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.
The 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.
Well, "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.
Rebranding 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.
The seriousness of DDG is to make damn sure that when someone types in the word 'dog' or some other simple search test, that pointed, relevant results are returned. And for that DDG seems to be getting better at each day.
He's been very upfront about who he is (one man operation) with zero interests in storing personal tracking information (the antithesis of Google).
Before the advent of Twitter, pg would attribute quotes to Tara Ploughman when he wanted to write one-sentence essays. (Since the advent of Twitter, he curiously has stopped writing one-sentence essays.)
Pick 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>; 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.
I 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.
When 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.
Is 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?
In 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.
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.
Quick 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?
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.
* Is disambiguation redundant? Can't you just infer from history and location? Or is this against your privacy policy?
The single most frustrating thing I find about search engines is iterating a non-trivial search. It doesn't seem like DDG has an edge against Google here. I long to see a search engine that makes it easy to send a question off to Quora, Vark etc.
(I like the bang feature: many of my searches are of the form "wiki william henry harrison". By the way, I think the search results for http://duckduckgo.com/?q=william+henry+harrison are out of order)
My ideal search-engine would be a cross between a traditional search-engine (machine) and a Q&A site (humans). If you were taking a lot of iterations to find your answer, you could simply expand the text-area to allow you to write out a human question.
So, short of DDG becoming also a Q&A site....yeah, dunno :P.
DDG seems to be less 'shopping biased' than google, and seems to do a better job of categorizing stuff.
I wished some search engine would implement a 'context' search though, that would really make my day.
Trying to find something like 'go' by keyword search alone is really a problem, you always have to add a bunch of other keywords in the hope that that will narrow it down enough, if you could just filter out those contexts that you're not interested in after the first search is over that would be really neat.
In 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.
Sharing 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.
It 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.
I 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?
Oh, 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.
LMGTFY 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.
I 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.
I 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.
Someone 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
Already happened. People seemed to have preferred the bing search results, and the Google-looking page. Perhaps somebody can even find the reference for this?
If 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.
