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The curious case of DuckDuckGo

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Re: The curious case of DuckDuckGo

#61

Post by magicalist »

sbashyal wrote: post #59
CharlieA wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the burrito analogy is flawed... searching for a word Google doesn't know about is more akin to ordering something that wasn't on the burrito menu at all, or say... if the cashier misheard your order and thought it could have been either chicken or beef so they made an educated guess and served you a Beef Burrito at the same time asking if that was what you meant, giving you an option to receive your correct…

But Google did show the correct results when I clicked on the link suggesting I was searching for the actual string. So it was on their menu all the time. I also communicated my request correctly to the other end; the other end deliberately changed my order!

no, it really is a terrible analogy :)

the menu contains almost every word in almost every language that's online (plus many misspellings and made up words and lists of meaningless character permutations and...), so if you are going to automatically correct a query, some set of words that are on the menu are going to have to be excluded.

On the other hand, if we accept that this case was suboptimal, the solution seems to be one of:

1) never autocorrect, only offer a "did you mean." I would bet this would result in more people having to click than the current situation (in spite of the annoyances reported in this thread).

2) be more conservative with corrections and offer a "did you mean" more often. 500,000 results for "uncollege" and the fact that correcting it to "college" repeats a word in the query string is a good argument for this particular case, at least. On the other hand, testing for "[some random word] and uncollege" never seems to correct for uncollege unless the other word is education related, which is interesting. While the autocorrect isn't smart enough to notice that it's correcting to a repeated word, it is doing some kind of clustering and deciding you probably meant college in this case.

Re: The curious case of DuckDuckGo

#62

Post by gulbrandr »

robrenaud wrote: post #24
gallerytungsten wrote: post #13

re: "Google over does search" (and "autocorrects" your search). This "feature" has been getting steadily more annoying, particularly with more obscure words, or words where there is a similar word that's in more widespread use. Thinking about it now, I was wishing there was a way to turn off this feature; but alas, a dive into http://www.google.com/preferences doesn't seem to have "turn off that dang autocorrect" as…

Append &nfpr=1 (short for "no full page replacement") to all your google queries: For example: http://www.google.com/search?q=college+or+uncollege&nfpr... I am sure it's not that hard to write a greasemonkey script to do that for you automatically, but I tend to like the feature, especially when I fat finger queries with my cell phone.

If you use google as your homepage, you can change the address to something like that:

http://www.google.com/webhp?complete=0&hl=en

You can add as many parameters as you want [1]. I use complete=0 to disable suggestions (I don't need/want them) and hl=en to force the interface language to be in english

[1] http://yoast.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/07/google-url-param...

Re: The curious case of DuckDuckGo

#63

Post by carbonica »

sbashyal wrote: post #51
ugh wrote: post #10

Point one I can’t understand. Google is optimized for the common case. It’s not that often that I want to search for something not in Google’s (excellent) dictionary.

Please see my burrito example in another response in this thread. Let me know if you think differently about search.

You've repeated the burrito example in nearly every subthread here, which is poor form to begin with, and it is a horrible example. You are comparing ("chicken burrito" -> "beef burrito") to ("something with words I've never seen in the past several billion searches" -> "something for which I have many results that get many clicks")

Please stop spamming your analogy to every subthread and please consider that it may in fact have some flaws.

Re: The curious case of DuckDuckGo

#64

Post by systems »

puredemo wrote: post #19

I've said this for a long time, but I think the biggest thing holding back DDG from truly widespread adoption is the name and branding. No one is ever going to 'dukgo' someone. Searching is a verb, the naming conventions used with DDG in its current form just don't fly. I'd love to talk shop with Gabriel about the identity decisions, and whether he is open to pivoting the brand identity now that the service is gettin…

Well, in general I like the Duck Logo and brand Now checking possible duck domains

    Duck.com redirect to google! 
    Duck.co points to a DDG community site!
    Goduck.com is for sales 
    Duck.net is blocked from work so I guess its a porn thing
What do you think will work as a good brand?

Re: The curious case of DuckDuckGo

#65

Post by CamperBob »

puredemo wrote: post #19

I've said this for a long time, but I think the biggest thing holding back DDG from truly widespread adoption is the name and branding. No one is ever going to 'dukgo' someone. Searching is a verb, the naming conventions used with DDG in its current form just don't fly. I'd love to talk shop with Gabriel about the identity decisions, and whether he is open to pivoting the brand identity now that the service is gettin…

Why not just say "Duck it"?

Re: The curious case of DuckDuckGo

#66

Post by mvts »

brusch wrote: post #44
puredemo wrote: post #19

I've said this for a long time, but I think the biggest thing holding back DDG from truly widespread adoption is the name and branding. No one is ever going to 'dukgo' someone. Searching is a verb, the naming conventions used with DDG in its current form just don't fly. I'd love to talk shop with Gabriel about the identity decisions, and whether he is open to pivoting the brand identity now that the service is gettin…

I've got the exact same feeling. Duck Duck Go looks and sounds quirky (and not in a good way for me).

Feelin the same way, but I'll be trying this anyway. I'd rather have it ugly and honest than good looking and insidious.

Re: The curious case of DuckDuckGo

#67

Post by rooshdi »

CamperBob wrote: post #65
puredemo wrote: post #19

I've said this for a long time, but I think the biggest thing holding back DDG from truly widespread adoption is the name and branding. No one is ever going to 'dukgo' someone. Searching is a verb, the naming conventions used with DDG in its current form just don't fly. I'd love to talk shop with Gabriel about the identity decisions, and whether he is open to pivoting the brand identity now that the service is gettin…

Why not just say "Duck it"?

Sounds good to me. Just Duck It! They can even create a promotion around it with a curved beak as the logo.

Re: The curious case of DuckDuckGo

#68

Post by yaix »

If you want your "college or uncollege" verbatim searched for by G, simple put a plus sign in from of it +"college or uncollege" to override the auto correction. Simple.

It's more about "geeks doing a web search" vs everybody else. Especially hackers want and are used to have a machine do exactly what is typed, without "smart correction".

But that is not true for most people, they want fault tolerance and a "you know what I mean" attitude from the machine. That's what G does.

I prefer DDG, of course.

Re: The curious case of DuckDuckGo

#70

Post by mdaniel »

systems wrote: post #64
puredemo wrote: post #19

I've said this for a long time, but I think the biggest thing holding back DDG from truly widespread adoption is the name and branding. No one is ever going to 'dukgo' someone. Searching is a verb, the naming conventions used with DDG in its current form just don't fly. I'd love to talk shop with Gabriel about the identity decisions, and whether he is open to pivoting the brand identity now that the service is gettin…

Well, in general I like the Duck Logo and brand Now checking possible duck domains Duck.com redirect to google! Duck.co points to a DDG community site! Goduck.com is for sales Duck.net is blocked from work so I guess its a porn thing What do you think will work as a good brand?

I didn't know about duck.com. Does anyone know the story behind that?
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