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New DuckDuckGo design

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Re: New DuckDuckGo design

#111

Post by pessimizer »

weaksauce wrote: post #93
kermitdance wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This post made me finally create an account here. I do admit that personalized searches improve result quality a lot, at least for some topics. But after using DDG as my main search engine for about a year, > especially for its lack of features just sounds wrong. On the contrary, I tend to feel really helpless when using Google because of the lack of DDG bang syntax. For me, DDG is like my perfectly customized search…

any good resources for learning how to effectively use DDG?

https://duckduckgo.com/bang.html

all of the boolean and ':' filters from google work also.

Re: New DuckDuckGo design

#112

Post by pessimizer »

rane wrote: post #72

I used DDG as my main search engine instead of Google for two weeks just now, but ended up going back because very often DDG just couldn't find the results I'm used to finding with Google in that amount of keywords. Usually I had to add "github", "npm" or some other word that would narrow it down for DDG, while Google just knew what I wanted and/or already visited. Maybe it's the lack of personalized search results o…

Instead, add !github or !npm to the beginning of the query to use those site's internal searches. For a specific fulltext site search, "site:" works.

Re: New DuckDuckGo design

#113

Post by kermitdance »

weaksauce wrote: post #93
kermitdance wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This post made me finally create an account here. I do admit that personalized searches improve result quality a lot, at least for some topics. But after using DDG as my main search engine for about a year, > especially for its lack of features just sounds wrong. On the contrary, I tend to feel really helpless when using Google because of the lack of DDG bang syntax. For me, DDG is like my perfectly customized search…

any good resources for learning how to effectively use DDG?

https://duck.co/help/features seems to be a good starting point, since it has links to the bang syntax(e.g. '!gh junit', '!a sicp'), instant answers('4 euros in €') and more. I learned most of the things I use today by experimenting and trying some bang-keywords I considered feasible before actually checking DDG documentation.

Re: New DuckDuckGo design

#115

Post by tzury »

Dear Gabriel Weinberg, after so many posts on HN, I am still missing the point behind DDG.

Can you tell me, the end user, what are other benefits of using DDG aside _privacy_ (given I am using chrome/incognito by default)?

Re: New DuckDuckGo design

#116

Post by qntmfred »

yegg wrote: post #29

Here's the announcement I just posted on our blog: https://duck.co/blog/whatsnew Thank you to everyone who provided feedback to us during our public beta period! Please keep the feedback coming so we can quickly iterate. We really do listen to it all.

http://shouldiuseacarousel.com/

Re: New DuckDuckGo design

#117

Post by billmalarky »

Walkman wrote: post #83

Honestly, I don't care how clean or nice the page design is, until it can't give me good results. Here is an example: The other day, I was searching for a Django core developer's contact. I knew his exact name was Baptiste Mispelon so I searched that directly. On Google [1] after his Twitter and Github accounts, the first picture is correct, and I did not have to do anything else, the contact infos are there, his pic…

"I think it is a mistake to concentrate on clean design on a search engine until the searching algorithm is not that good. AFAIK Google's page ranking algorithm is well known, when I were in university I even heard stories that a student (going on the same class as me) reproduced the algorithms only on his own!"

Dude they're working on it. Modern search isn't as easy as having a college student implement a crawler with the pagerank algorithm, don't belittle the team like that.

Re: New DuckDuckGo design

#118

Post by _zekiel »

billmalarky wrote: post #117
Walkman wrote: post #83

Honestly, I don't care how clean or nice the page design is, until it can't give me good results. Here is an example: The other day, I was searching for a Django core developer's contact. I knew his exact name was Baptiste Mispelon so I searched that directly. On Google [1] after his Twitter and Github accounts, the first picture is correct, and I did not have to do anything else, the contact infos are there, his pic…

"I think it is a mistake to concentrate on clean design on a search engine until the searching algorithm is not that good. AFAIK Google's page ranking algorithm is well known, when I were in university I even heard stories that a student (going on the same class as me) reproduced the algorithms only on his own!" Dude they're working on it. Modern search isn't as easy as having a college student implement a crawler wi…

Thanks! We'd also encourage every developer to check out: http://duckduckhack.com/ The example reported doesn't seem to be an issue the organic links but if you find any at all, please let us know. Also, we're on the lookout for any instant answers that pop by default but are irrelevant for the query. If you see any, please let us know at https://duck.co/forum

Re: New DuckDuckGo design

#119

Post by ianstormtaylor »

This is a really amazing direction in terms of design. Like most people probably, I've pretty much ignored DDG because it didn't seem to be doing anything more than Google already did, but this design is really interesting for going in a new direction.

The only thing that stands out to me as less useful than the equivalent Google search at this point is the hiearchy of the results. Google uses a link-like blue color for the titles of each result, which seems like a leftover from a past age of the web, but is actually useful for scan-ability because the text of the headers stands out.

Compare the current DuckDuckGo... https://i.cloudup.com/vrwZgUkOty.png

...to Google... https://i.cloudup.com/eFCFEE5TYG.png

...to an adjusted version of DuckDuckGo... https://i.cloudup.com/jluIYZWtzz.png

Having an extra color for the headings lets you scan the page much more easily, which lets you get to the result you wanted faster. The downside is that since their brand color is red, it feels "best" to have the highlight color red. But then that has some negative emotional connotations. Tried green as well, but it didn't stand on it's own enough since there's so little green on the page.

Anyways, I've switched to DDG as my default and will try it out for a while again. I also love those favicons that show up next to the domain names.

Re: New DuckDuckGo design

#120

Post by justizin »

ianstormtaylor wrote: post #119

This is a really amazing direction in terms of design. Like most people probably, I've pretty much ignored DDG because it didn't seem to be doing anything more than Google already did, but this design is really interesting for going in a new direction. The only thing that stands out to me as less useful than the equivalent Google search at this point is the hiearchy of the results. Google uses a link-like blue color…

"Like most people probably, I've pretty much ignored DDG because it didn't seem to be doing anything more than Google already did"

Generally the primary feature is that DDG does _less_ than Google, insofar as tracking you around the internet.

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