DuckDuckGo is growing

DuckDuckGo is growing(gabrielweinberg.com)

147 points by jeffmiller 14 years ago | 55 comments

Congratulations Gabriel. DDG is invaluable for those of us who do not want our searches logged into a database, who do not want search results sorted by whether or not an acquaintance has "liked" a page. I wear my DDG t-shirt out and have been asked about it a couple of times. I wear it happily.

Pewpewarrows 14 years ago | |

For what it's worth, I've seen absolutely no indication that Google takes social data into account when ranking results. They only show it as metadata on items within the original ordering.

efsavage 14 years ago | | |

Actually I saw an example of this twice earlier today. I did a search for some relatively common terms ("api debug" or something like that) and a friend's companies API came up on the first page. Hopped into incognito mode, was not to be found in the first several pages. Same thing happened not too long after, a friend's blog came up for a term, tried incognito, it was gone.

patja 14 years ago |

I tried switching to DDG, but found that I was really missing Google's date range filter. Especially for troubleshooting searches where you can get results that are relevant to the search terms but have obsolete old content, I almost always hit "past year" or even "past month". I know about the sort by date feature in DDG, but I really want date as a filter on the whole result set, with a sort by relevance within the filtered results.

re_todd 14 years ago | |

Agree 100%. I use the "past year" or "past month" at least once a day. No date ranges to fiddle with, no new page to have to go to to enter a date range .... just click the link and the results appear in a second. DDG would be awesome with this.

jvehent 14 years ago | |

I support that ! This is the feature I miss the most in DDG. Most of my searches during the day relate to tech stuff, and recent content is one of the most relevant criteria (usually, I filter to get the result from the last 12 months).

epi0Bauqu 14 years ago | | |

Thx! This is something we've wanted to do, but don't have great data for yet. If you use the sort by date feature (for timely pages) there is a date displayed. You can get to that by selecting it in the drop down next to the search box or by typing sort:date or just s:d at the end of the query.

You can also quickly get to the google ranges (when needed) via our !bang syntax: http://duckduckgo.com/bang.html - e.g. just add !gyear !gmonth etc to the end of your query.

DanBC 14 years ago | |

Weirdly, I want a time filter, but to block recent results and promote results older than X years.

I can think of the example, but there was something with few results for (about) 12 years ago (and those were the ones I wanted) but millions for this year. (And I didn't want those.)

Sodaware 14 years ago |

The !bang syntax is definitely one of DDG's best features. Being able to access a few hundred site searches with a keyword is incredibly powerful, and saves time on creating quick searches in Firefox.

(The full list of !bang commands http://duckduckgo.com/bang.html)

skrebbel 14 years ago | |

I disagree. It belongs in the browser.

Also, Opera has had it for years (right-click any form field and choose "Create Search" - no plugins or options screens needed)

slowpoke 14 years ago | |

Definitely agree. I set DDG as Firefox' default search engine (about:config --> keyword.URL) and it has come to the point that searching with the dedicated search bar has begun feeling clunky. I think there are no important sites which I frequent that aren't included in the huge amount of bangs yet. Could just as well get rid of the search bar altogether...

pkamb 14 years ago | |

Did it mess any other programmers up, thinking "NOT youtube"? Don't search youtube, search the rest of the web...

deno 14 years ago | | |

Being used to Google, I would first try “-site:youtube.com .”

dmfdmf 14 years ago |

What I like is no zooming car ads blocking content like on Yahoo or the unhelpful auto-entry and auto-guessing features that gets in my way like on Google (e.g. searching for what Google thinks I meant instead of what I actually typed, did Google buy Microsoft Bob and Office Assistant Clippy?)

DanBC 14 years ago | |

It's particularly annoying when Google substitutes words without telling you. Or when they silently drop words and you only realise when a ctrl-F through the web-page says nothing found.

Pewpewarrows 14 years ago | | |

That's what the "+" before a search term is for: this is exactly the word I'm looking for, and every result must have this. Otherwise it tries to find the most relavant page that's closest to what you typed. It makes sense to have that by default: do you really want to miss the exact page you were searching for because you used the term "graduate" instead of "graduating"?

jmarbach 14 years ago |

Gabriel is taking on a challenge that extends beyond Google's reach, the filter bubble. Luckily he's been able to implement several human curation strategies to make a better search engine based on reliable search results. On the flip side, Google has been fostering a limiting perspective on the world's information due to their personal relevance algorithms which drive more ad clicks.

snarfy 14 years ago |

I was always impressed with the speed of response by the ddg team. I'd report an issue, and within minutes (sometimes seconds) I'd have a reply from the ddg team. Broken queries were fixed in days, sometimes hours.

slowpoke 14 years ago | |

I can support this. Even trivialities like a (slightly) miss-categorized !bang got fixed in hours.

forcer 14 years ago |

I think its a good move. In my opinion you can only play the one-man-band card for a while and then you need to come up with other reasons why press should write about you. DDG has innovated quickly and been able to address user's needs at the right time when they were discussed in the press, picking up the loyal users on the way...

binarymax 14 years ago |

Thanks for building and growing DDG! Have been using it for awhile now as my default search engine and I love it.

skrebbel 14 years ago |

I love all of DDG, except its speed (might be latency, I'm in Europe)

epi0Bauqu 14 years ago | |

Thx! We should be getting some European servers in the short-term. We just added some in Singapore, and Europe is next.

skrebbel 14 years ago | | |

Happy to hear that!

steveh73 14 years ago |

I quite like DDG but from my region (NZ) it's just too slow compared to Google. I look forward to when you're big enough to have datacentres in Auckland or even Sydney.

epi0Bauqu 14 years ago | |

We just added some servers in singapore that should have speeded us up for your region. Have you tried it recently (last couple of weeks). If it is still slow would love to continue debugging at http://duckduckgo.com/feedback.html

DanBC 14 years ago |

I go to "goodies" and "zero click info sources". I see this line:-

Language SE - quint in quintessential

So I clicky the link, but it appears to have nothing to do with Stack Exchange. Some of the others work - Numote Big Bang Schedule has a nice box at top of the search results.

ALSO: Do you have a printable cheat sheet for all the bang syntax and extras? A4, mono, please!

epi0Bauqu 14 years ago | |

At the top I see a blurb from the English Language StackExchange linking to http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/2/where-does-the-... - is that not coming up for you?

DanBC 14 years ago | | |

Nope :-(

I get this: ---

Did you mean quintin quintessential?

Welcome to Quintessential Filter Tips Ltd. Quintessential Tips Ltd. Makers and Purveyors of Fine Quality Environmentally Conscious Smoking Products. quintessentialtips.com

Quintessential | Define Quintessential at Dictionary.com adjective . 1. of the pure and essential essence of something: the quintessential Jewish delicatessen. 2. of or pertaining to the most perfect embodiment of something: the quintessential performance of the Brandenburg Concertos. dictionary.reference.com/browse/quintessential More results

DanBC 14 years ago | | |

Let me know what information you need and I'll send it to your feedback page. I might not be for a few hours though!

bull 14 years ago |

Is there a way to get google results instead of yahoo results? I don't mean using the !g syntax, but getting actual google results in the format of duckduckgo.

I love the site, but alot of the time, Yahoo's results are weak.

epi0Bauqu 14 years ago | |

No, but we use other results besides Yahoo's (including our own). I'd appreciate specific examples when they come up: http://duckduckgo.com/feedback.html

startupcomment 14 years ago |

Congratulations, Gabriel! I am very happy for you. DDG is my default search engine, and I suggest that friends and family use it. Just wondering why you don't use https as a default setting. Also, sometimes I find the continuous scrolling of search results makes it a bit more difficult to keep track of where I have been than with Google's default 10 results per page. Consequently, sometimes I find it easier to quickly scan Google search results. I wonder if there is something further that you could tweak in this regard? Keep up the great work!

epi0Bauqu 14 years ago | |

Thx! We don't use https by default because it is noticeably slower to connect. Also noted on continuous results -- our non-JS versions do have some pagination.

white_devil 14 years ago |

So what's the plan for making money with DDG?

sequoia 14 years ago | |

There is some context based advertising in place already, via amazon (used to be thru some "invite only" ad service) but the volume of advertising is very low, only one ad per several visits, and I'd venture that the rate of adblock usage and non-clicking of ads is much higher among the DDG set. I hope they find a way to monetize!

EponymousCoward 14 years ago | |

Paid search results? Would it really be incongruent with what DDG is doing?

slouch 14 years ago | |

Ads. They are already running ads including amazon affiliate.

njharman 14 years ago | |

Acqusition.

maximusprime 14 years ago | |

They got investment. Who needs profit these days?!

mkr-hn 14 years ago | | |

If you're running a company in an industry that's being encroached on by Google, throwing some money at a serious competitor like DDG might be a good investment.

suking 14 years ago |

I quickly used DDG for the first time for some searches and you guys place WAY too much emphasis on exact query match domains. Also, including .com.au addresses in a local search when I'm in the US is probably not a lot of help.

Best of luck.

gurraman 14 years ago | |

This is biting me as well - I use search in place of the address bar a lot. Now, in DDG, searches like "asoiaf reddit" does not find the root-site.

I think I'm not alone in using the address bar less and less.

While I'm at it:

- I would probably change the color of the address in the results to make it easier to distinguish from the excerpt/description.

- Remove the green background that is displayed on hover. I find it hard to scan entries with that big green blob hovering :)

Edit: formatting

pkamb 14 years ago | | |

+1 for changing the URL color. I'd prefer it directly under the title as well. And maybe find a way to emphasize the important parts of the URL, cut out the random numbers.

suking 14 years ago | | |

Agree - google's UI is 1000X more pleasant on the eyes, DDG made me dizzy and hard to distinguish between each result, especially with their infinite scroll.

epi0Bauqu 14 years ago | |

Thx for the feedback - duly noted! Would appreciate the specific example for the .com.au stuff here: http://duckduckgo.com/feedback.html

dbbo 14 years ago |

DDG is a great search engine. I was stoked to see that the Midori[1] browser adopted it as the default search engine. However, if I can't seem to find something there, I try Scroogle with SSL[2]

1 - http://www.twotoasts.de/index.php?/pages/midori_summary.html

2 - https://ssl.scroogle.org/