Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

DuckDuckGo is blowing up

duckduckgo.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 219 posts

Re: DuckDuckGo is blowing up

#201

Post by joedevon »

smsm42 wrote: post #171
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"?

I tried it as default engine for a month and unfortunately had to go back to Google. There are some nice touches (such as automatic wikipedia links) but in many cases the results are just not as good as Google gets.

The shortcuts are what converted me to a happy user. Programming question? "my search !so". Map? "address !m". Will True Knowledge have a good answer? "How old is Obama? !tk". For Wolfram Alpha: "How old is Obama !wa". Is Google really the best place for the answer? "who won the australian open !g". Even if 90% of your searches are google, ddg is a great way to access it!

Re: DuckDuckGo is blowing up

#202

Post by shaggy »

It's very exciting to see usage of DDG increasing and the service getting more and more recognition. I've been using DDG for almost two years now and love the service. The privacy is what drew me in, but the goodies are what made me a user for life. It's the default for my browser and I use the iPhone and iPad apps regularly. Keep up the good work DDG! I'd be happy to lend my sysadmin skills to help :)

Re: DuckDuckGo is blowing up

#203

Post by alecco »

minwcnt5 wrote: post #170
AznHisoka wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the problem... In the short run, DDG may be winning small victories. In the long run, they definitely need to build their own index. They need to at least start now, then turn the switch on when it's ready. Of course it's gonna require major infrastructure, but they are building a search engine, so that's a given.

Building their own index is only worthwhile if they can build a good ranking algorithm to go along with it. And they're at a huge disdvantage in doing so because they don't track users to improve quality whereas Bing does.

it could be an open source project, i'd be interested

Re: DuckDuckGo is blowing up

#204

Post by Darraghb »

Great to see DDG gaining traction.

However, I switched my Chrome search to DDG last year and the one thing that I realised I couldn't live without was maps.

I didn't realise how often I must search for an address and to have location appear in search makes life so much easier.

If you guys integrated with Openstreetmap, I'd switch back in an instant!

Re: DuckDuckGo is blowing up

#205

Post by iusable »

epi0Bauqu wrote: post #144
iusable wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I LOVE your work. So happy to get simple, clean & shareable results again! Any chance of integrated media galleries? I think Bing & Google are really effin this up.

Can you be more specific as to what you mean/want in this area?

Hope that made more sense now :)

Re: DuckDuckGo is blowing up

#206

Post by pirateking »

jsz0 wrote: post #188
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…

Can you guys talk Apple into adding it as a preset search-bar option in Safari? It's kind of a pain to add it yourself or get out of the habit of using the search-bar

I use SafariOmnibar[1] to add DDG as my default search provider. Since an omnibar will be shipped by default with Safari in Mountain Lion, I am also hoping that Apple will consider providing DDG as an option for search engine preference (especially on iOS as well).

[1] http://hackemist.com/SafariOmnibar/

Re: DuckDuckGo is blowing up

#207

Post by smsm42 »

joedevon wrote: post #201
smsm42 wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried it as default engine for a month and unfortunately had to go back to Google. There are some nice touches (such as automatic wikipedia links) but in many cases the results are just not as good as Google gets.

The shortcuts are what converted me to a happy user. Programming question? "my search !so". Map? "address !m". Will True Knowledge have a good answer? "How old is Obama? !tk". For Wolfram Alpha: "How old is Obama !wa". Is Google really the best place for the answer? "who won the australian open !g". Even if 90% of your searches are google, ddg is a great way to access it!

The thing is that, for example, for programming questions google finds it on SO without any shortcuts needed. If I type address in Google it will give me a link to the map anyway. I know it takes a second to type !whatever, but you need to remember that. And if you need to stop and think "was it !so or !s or !stack or whatever it was?" you lose your concentration and next thing you know you've spent half hour browsing unrelated articles on Wikipedia. Exaggerating a bit but the point is these !things are a speedbump.

Re: DuckDuckGo is blowing up

#208

Post by jeltz »

nl wrote: post #187

Wed 28-Mar-2012 1,518,581 direct 9,580,029 api 225,161 bot Am I reading this right? DDG does ~6 times as much traffic in API requests compared to search requests? That makes a pretty significant difference to the monetisation strategy!

Note though that the growth of direct requests is much faster than the growth of API requests.

Re: DuckDuckGo is blowing up

#209

Post by [deleted] »

nl wrote: post #187

Wed 28-Mar-2012 1,518,581 direct 9,580,029 api 225,161 bot Am I reading this right? DDG does ~6 times as much traffic in API requests compared to search requests? That makes a pretty significant difference to the monetisation strategy!

[deleted]

Re: DuckDuckGo is blowing up

#210

Post by slowpoke »

smsm42 wrote: post #207
joedevon wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The shortcuts are what converted me to a happy user. Programming question? "my search !so". Map? "address !m". Will True Knowledge have a good answer? "How old is Obama? !tk". For Wolfram Alpha: "How old is Obama !wa". Is Google really the best place for the answer? "who won the australian open !g". Even if 90% of your searches are google, ddg is a great way to access it!

The thing is that, for example, for programming questions google finds it on SO without any shortcuts needed. If I type address in Google it will give me a link to the map anyway. I know it takes a second to type !whatever, but you need to remember that. And if you need to stop and think "was it !so or !s or !stack or whatever it was?" you lose your concentration and next thing you know you've spent half hour browsin…

I disagree. Most of them are extremely intuitive. Heck, I've once found out about new bangs I didn't know by typing in the name/abbreviation of the site as a bang on a whim, and it worked!

Also, if you think the bangs are unintuitive, what's your opinion on keyboard shortcuts? It's basically the same thing.

Post reply on HN