DuckDuckGo is blowing up • Hacker News Board

Re: DuckDuckGo is blowing up

#41

Post by rplnt » Thu, Mar 29, 2012, 2:26 PM UTC

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…

Ad confidence; my default search engine is Google's "Feeling Lucky". Many repetitive searches (wiki, imdb, documentation) are so accurate I can skip the step of clicking on results. But most of the time I use keyword searches anyway. With google, images, wolframalpha, tineye (because google image search is still blocked using user agent sniffing), torrentz, public transit, and a few more (including stuff like open a subreddit, so not really a search).

Re: DuckDuckGo is blowing up

#42

Post by rplnt » Thu, Mar 29, 2012, 2:28 PM UTC

reginaldo wrote: post #13

pg's analysis was spot on, then [1]. I recently realized DuckDuckGo would be a hit when a hacker friend who does not read HN started using DDG as his primary search engine. To me, this means it is out there. I switched too, at least for a while, and now I use both google and DDG, constantly having the impression that DDG's results are getting better and better. [1] http://paulgraham.com/ambitious.html

DDG used to be pushed heavily on reddit. Not in a bad way.

Re: DuckDuckGo is blowing up

#43

Post by rplnt » Thu, Mar 29, 2012, 2:30 PM UTC

tonfa wrote: post #37

Do they publish revenue? I wonder what the infrastructure costs are and how they scale in comparison to the number of request.

I think that most of their results come from Bing if I remember correctly. So the scaling doesn't have to be as heavy as it might seem. But I may be wrong.

Re: DuckDuckGo is blowing up

#44

Post by trotsky » Thu, Mar 29, 2012, 2:31 PM UTC

demetris wrote: post #26

pubby wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I generally stick to Google for programming related searches and use DDG for the rest. Hopefully DDG improves to the point where I can use it 100% of the time.

If it were possible to take Bing’s search results, throw a handful of people at them and match the quality of Google’s results, Google would not be where it is today. That is the main problem I see with Duck Duck Go. The quality of its search results depends on Bing. Duck Duck Go can do things to offer something better than Bing, but not that much better that matches Google’s quality.

the zero click content is often helpful to me, and is certainly a significant upgrade for me over basic bing results.

Re: DuckDuckGo is blowing up

#45

Post by dr_ » Thu, Mar 29, 2012, 2:32 PM UTC

As with most new search startups, people will give it a chance. Hence the increase in traffic. I tried it a couple of times but, as most people do, I then checked Google just to make sure I'd really covered what is considered the full spectrum of search.

Re: DuckDuckGo is blowing up

#46

Post by jackery » Thu, Mar 29, 2012, 2:32 PM UTC

spodek wrote: post #11

People care about privacy and not being tracked. I predict Google's arms race with Facebook to profit more from user's data will augment this growth. And/or dampen that arms race. That's why I search with DuckDuckGo by default (previously Scroogle).

With everyone's concern with privacy, I'm surprised Ask Eraser isn't mentioned more frequently (http://sp.ask.com/en/docs/about/askeraser.shtml).

Re: DuckDuckGo is blowing up

#47

Post by prakash » Thu, Mar 29, 2012, 2:33 PM UTC

orta wrote: post #19

It's interesting to see how many requests are coming from the API, offhand I can't think of any uses that I've come into contact with. Does anyone know who is using the API?

Fastestfox, Cyberspace and others use our API: http://duckduckgo.com/api.html

Re: DuckDuckGo is blowing up

#48

Post by spot » Thu, Mar 29, 2012, 2:33 PM UTC

So how is DuckDuckGo going to make money?

Re: DuckDuckGo is blowing up

#49

Post by prakash » Thu, Mar 29, 2012, 2:38 PM UTC

PaulHoule wrote: post #5

if i get that right, people are doing a lot more API calls than direct searches... Which begs the questions of (i) who they are, (ii) what they're doing, and (iii) how this can be monetized?

Fastestfox, Cyberspace and others use our API: http://duckduckgo.com/api.html

Would love to hear ideas on (iii).

Re: DuckDuckGo is blowing up

#50

Post by TylerE » Thu, Mar 29, 2012, 2:38 PM UTC

kylek wrote: post #35

mrspeaker wrote: post #17

!g is the google killer. I switched to DDG, but kept drifting back to see if Google was doing better. I find myself using !g less and less, as I get used to the result format. At the moment, DDG reminds me of Firefox (or was it WaterSquirrel then?) back-in-the-day. Its something that "feels" better than what is the standard - and it's something that I go on and on about to other nerds, when I'm drunk ;)

> (or was it WaterSquirrel then?) Phoenix -> FireBird -> FireFox :)

He's probably thinking of "IceWeasel" which was a rebranded firefox a linux distro (Fedora maybe?) was shipping due to some sort of copyright/licensing quirk.