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DuckDuckGo is blowing up

duckduckgo.com

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Re: DuckDuckGo is blowing up

#131

Post by adambard »

geoffw8 wrote: post #9

Wow, thats a great curve. Just wanted to throw in my personal experience with DuckDuckGo, and it doesn't necessarily reflect on DuckDuckGo specifically, however: After seeing them pop up here once or twice quite recently I thought I'd give it a go, I opened up preferences in Chrome and switched my default search over to DDG. It felt good, made a nice change but was certainly a bit "odd". I found what I wanted, most o…

I have DDG set as my default, but I admit that that's more or less despite the quality of the search results.

When I'm searching for "discovery" purposes, such as when trying to diagnose an error message, I add a !g. When I want an image, !gi. If I want to look up some library, I use !clojure, !python, !php, etc. The only time I let it fall to DDG is when I'm looking for some specific thing that I don't know the URL for, like "American Airlines", or something that I know has a lot of results of about equivalent quality, like "Pulled Pork Recipe."

I find I'm effectively using DDG as a search routing service. I really enjoy that, and I miss it when I use a computer that's not set up with chrome and ddg as the search default, but I feel like they're missing out on some ad revenue here.

Re: DuckDuckGo is blowing up

#132

Post by cromwellian »

DDG: http://duckduckgo.com/?q=the+movie+where+evil+is+in+a+toaste...

Time Bandits is #8

vs https://www.google.com/#hl=en&output=search&q=the+mo...

First hit.

I realize it is in fashion to make bold claims that somehow Google destroyed its search in a monomaniacal pursuit of social, but a hyperbolic if not patently untrue story. Yes, the user interface has changed and gotten fancier and more cluttered with the introduction of toolbar and sidebar (that's been happening over years, prior to G+), but the actual organic results have not changed much at all except to improve on average, even if you take into account Search Plus Your World (which you can disable)

Shocking, but most people at Google do not work on G+, it is not the sole focus of the company, and the narrative that Google is simply dropping everything else to mindlessly chase Facebook is blogosphere fiction. There are over 30,000 employees and I would be surprised if even 2% of them worked on G+. Teams at Google are typically small and at any given time, people are working on a large number of projects. It's simply not Google's culture to mindlessly focus on a single unproven product to the detriment of others. If anything, Google is frequently criticized for doing too many new things at once, and that's what you get when you have a company run with engineering culture.

Google makes most of their money from Search and Ads. You can bet that they watch data from search quality and marketshare like a hawk, and if social was causing Google search to suck more and lose customers, you can bet they'd turn it off in a heartbeat. It's been said by some analysts that every 1% loss in search marketshare is $1 billion in revenue. Facebook isn't making that much money, and so from a cost-benefit analysis, sacrificing billions in search share revenue to try and gain social-search revenue doesn't sound rational.

It would thus be reasonable to assume, that any changes Google actually makes to core search are a) conservative b) subjected to a battery of scientific tests and c) as low risk as they can make them to their core business.

But the way you read things in the Blogosphere, Search has been radically altered. The evidence just isn't there.

Re: DuckDuckGo is blowing up

#134

Post by thecombjelly »

I don't really understand why so many people think that the results on DDG are worse than Google. Maybe I just don't search for things that other people do, or I search differently, but for me, I usually prefer the DDG results. Most of it has to do with the zero click info and the disambiguation. Especially the disambiguation. I get better results because most things I search for could be disambiguated, and I take full advantage of that to quickly give me just the results related to what I'm looking for.

Re: DuckDuckGo is blowing up

#135

Post by krelian »

cromwellian wrote: post #132

DDG: http://duckduckgo.com/?q=the+movie+where+evil+is+in+a+toaste... Time Bandits is #8 vs https://www.google.com/#hl=en&output=search&q=the+mo... First hit. I realize it is in fashion to make bold claims that somehow Google destroyed its search in a monomaniacal pursuit of social, but a hyperbolic if not patently untrue story. Yes, the user interface has changed and gotten fancier and more cluttered with the introdu…

It's very common these days to take many amazing products for granted. Google search is an amazing tool that suffers a lot from very vocal complaints and not enough praise. The only areas it is lacking in are those that are heavily targeted by spammers.

Re: DuckDuckGo is blowing up

#136

Post by TeMPOraL »

rpicard wrote: post #85
memset wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Way cool. Going to try using this as my default search engine for a while. I really really like the "alternative to" feature. What could I do to help you get better at alternatives which are not as popular? (eg, "alternative to cheetahmail" or "alternative to grubhub" or "alternative to xkcd"?) Also, what kind of feedback would you need to help improve the tech-related searches? Like "ebcdic table" or "1010 in hex"?

The alternatives are pulled from http://alternativeto.net so adding to their site will add to the zero-click info. You can contribute to tech-related searches by contributing to the open source zero-click info (see this tutorial https://github.com/duckduckgo/duckduckgo/wiki/Open-Source-Pl... ). You can also send in ideas here: https://duckduckgo.uservoice.com/forums/5168-plugins .

Obligatory meta-comment:

http://alternativeto.net/software/alternativeto/

Re: DuckDuckGo is blowing up

#137

Post by smallblacksun »

pushingbits wrote: post #103
moultano wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would love to see some example queries to debug if you have them handy. (You can check your search history https://www.google.com/history/ to jog your memory if you have it turned on.)

Here's one: python list popleft Third result is: http://docs.python.org/library/stdtypes.html 6th result is: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4426663/how-do-i-remove-t... Neither one of those contains "popleft".

Try putting quotes around popleft in your query. That works in this case to get rid of the results that don't specifically include the word.

Re: DuckDuckGo is blowing up

#138

Post by sjs382 »

tansey wrote: post #127
reasonattlm wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I redirect to Google for my site search at Fight Aging! at the moment because it returns far better results than DDG, and with my ~8000 posts and countless topics doing a great job with my own custom search just doesn't make economic sense. If DDG could do as well as Google for the archives I'd switch in an instant; I prefer the idea of sending users somewhere other than Google for queries that may involve medical co…

At least you get indexed by DDG. Curvio has been live for 2 months now, Google has indexed over 2000 of our pages, and we're the #1 result for over 100 different Google queries. Meanwhile, DDG still thinks you're searching for "Cuervo" [1] and has not even indexed our homepage, which has hundreds of backlinks at this point. [1] http://duckduckgo.com/?q=curvio

Yeah, getting indexed seems like a problem with DDG sometimes. Is there a way to submit a sitemap.xml or something similar?

Re: DuckDuckGo is blowing up

#139

Post by webwright »

white_devil wrote: post #71
epi0Bauqu wrote: post #59

Thank you all! (I'm the founder.) In response to a lot of the comments here, please know that two major things we're working on are better programming queries ( https://duckduckgo.com/tech.html -- one of my new favorites https://duckduckgo.com/?q=alternative+to+picasa ) and speed. For speed, just this week we upgraded our whole caching system, which should significantly speed up a lot of queries. I'd be interested to…

Now that you have investors, they'll expect you to multiply DDG's worth. So how do you make money with it?

Making money with a search engine is a solved problem. Making a search engine worth switching to is not-- that's what they are (and should be) focused on. I'd wager their investors are telling them the same thing.
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