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

Duck Duck Go = Perfect search engine for programmers

fseek.me

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–49 of 49 posts

Re: Duck Duck Go = Perfect search engine for programmers

#41

Post by epi0Bauqu »

silkodyssey wrote: post #14
pavs wrote: post #4

I like Duck Duck Go. Mostly because, there is someone out there who is courageous enough to give it a go, single-handedly, into the search engine market. So props to him, I can support someone like him. Having said that. There can be too much of a good thing. I feel that HN is being used as an advertising platform to promote DDG, which in itself is not such a bad thing when there are major developments and exiting fe…

I would like to know what was the motivation for starting the project. I don't think it's necessarily a bad idea for David to tackle Goliath but there has to be a unique value proposition. Based on the information I have found about the project the only area I can see this competing is in the user experience (scrolling results, encrypted search etc). Maybe someone who knows more about the project can enlighten us.

The original motivation was getting fed up with spam in Google. Here's an interview where I explained: http://www.snugd.com/2009/04/24/3361/

Re: Duck Duck Go = Perfect search engine for programmers

#42

Post by epi0Bauqu »

cookiecaper wrote: post #20

When I tried out DuckDuckGo about a year ago, I noticed it was really good for general queries, but always had to go back to Google when I searched for compiler error messages or other programming-related things. Because of this, I eventually slipped back into full-time Googleage, despite giving DDG a try for about a month and a half.

A lot has changed in a year. I'd love if you'd try it again and email me your detailed feedback, so in another year maybe you'll switch :)

Re: Duck Duck Go = Perfect search engine for programmers

#43

Post by epi0Bauqu »

BoppreH wrote: post #29

When I first heard about DDG it was because of it's privacy. I couldn't care less for that. Now, saying that it is good for programming questions made me set it as the default search engine without even testing. Zero-click info is amazing for quick doc checks, the auto-extending page is sweet and actually displaying the page link and favicon is a lot more informative. Two things though: - It's slow. Maybe because I'm…

Thx. Servers are currently in the US; hence, the slowness for some people outside of the US. Eventually I hope to improve the infrastructure there.

Special character handling will be much better as I index programming documentation and Stack Overflow with the special characters.

Re: Duck Duck Go = Perfect search engine for programmers

#44

Post by JoachimSchipper »

jacquesm wrote: post #6
silkodyssey wrote: post #2

I am current taking the search engine for a spin and it has made a great first impression. I particularly like that instead of paging the search results it displays the results on demand using ajax. I prefer this interface because with less effort I see more results. I've found that with Google I tend to not to move past the first page and by doing that I probably miss out on information that may have been useful to…

Google will not do that because it would cost them a fortune in missed ad impressions and clicks. The big question is how Gabriel will scale DDG with the design decisions already made. It's quite possible that DDG can get to profitability with the layout the way it is today, maybe not as profitable as google but I don't think that would matter much. Making a step back in income is a lot harder than foregoing a certai…

I don't think he needs to do much scaling - DDG needs some machines, and adding a couple of people may be useful, but it seems to do well enough so far, and expenses can't be very high. It certainly doesn't need Google's profitability to keep going...

Re: Duck Duck Go = Perfect search engine for programmers

#45

Post by epi0Bauqu »

ecaradec wrote: post #30

As a win32 programmer, I always try things like createwindowex and I expect to get msdn as it is the most informative page. I can get it on DDG (doesn't even, show up ). It's the first result on google, even if I mistype it like createwindowe or createwindoaexaze. But may be I'm a dinosaur.

The first result at http://duckduckgo.com/?q=createwindowex is not what you want? It goes to http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms632680(VS.85).aspx

Re: Duck Duck Go = Perfect search engine for programmers

#46

Post by JoachimSchipper »

jacquesm wrote: post #33
nkurz wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great statistics, thanks! That's much higher than I would have guessed. While I agree that very few people change the default number of results, I would have also guessed that few click through to a second page. Personally, I don't like the AJAX update approach. I'd much rather that a site just give me a long list of results, and allow me to scroll through them without loading delays. If I could set Google to return…

> I'd much rather that a site just give me a long list of results, and allow me to scroll through them without loading delays. I think that is a balance between server load and user convenience. On ddg it is already pretty fast, if you aren't in a real hurry it is hardly noticeable and faster than clicking through to a second page.

Well, that, and the fact that users really hate pages that are slow to load. (Although most of the loading would happen off-screen, this can still slow down users/other requests/...)

Re: Duck Duck Go = Perfect search engine for programmers

#47

Post by ntoshev »

epi0Bauqu wrote: post #40
timr wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I'd rather see 10 more articles about DDG than one more about the ipad or fakestevejobs." ...because clearly, those are the only choices. As long as we're throwing around false dichotomies, I'd rather see 10 more articles about the internals of a search engine than one more rah-rah post about DDG.

What would you like to know? For starters: http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2009/03/duck-duck-go-arc...

Do you maintain full text indices for parts of the web and which parts, or does it all fall back to external services like Wikipedia search, Yahoo BOSS, etc?

If you have some indices on your servers, how do you build and search them? Is it your own technology, or open source (Xapian, Lucene-based, etc)? In what percent of searches do you display results from your own indices?

Re: Duck Duck Go = Perfect search engine for programmers

#48

Post by zackattack »

epi0Bauqu wrote: post #34
zackattack wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice. I will switch when it handles mathematical expressions well.

What kind? It might already or might be an easy fix.

If I search for x^2 I want to see results related to (x squared), not "X-2" or "X2", etc. The ^ is deliberate and should not be ignored.

Re: Duck Duck Go = Perfect search engine for programmers

#49

Post by Pistos2 »

epi0Bauqu wrote: post #42
cookiecaper wrote: post #20

When I tried out DuckDuckGo about a year ago, I noticed it was really good for general queries, but always had to go back to Google when I searched for compiler error messages or other programming-related things. Because of this, I eventually slipped back into full-time Googleage, despite giving DDG a try for about a month and a half.

A lot has changed in a year. I'd love if you'd try it again and email me your detailed feedback, so in another year maybe you'll switch :)

(To grandparent comment[er]) I also had a similar experience a while ago; but I gave DDG a second change recently, and indeed, the results have improved enough for me to keep DDG as my primary search engine, resorting to Google only once every 50 searches or so.
Post reply on HN