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

The curious case of DuckDuckGo

hacksandthoughts.posterous.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 103 posts

Re: The curious case of DuckDuckGo

#91

Post by jonathansizz »

alohahacker wrote: post #80

its crazy that through marketing and all the push DuckDuckGo is getting that they only get searched 250,000 times a day. With the hundreads of millions of searches that go on everyday you would think they could pull a little bit more. I guess it truly is hard for people to change who they search with after all is said and done.

I don't think it's surprising. The only place I hear talk about DDG is on this website and a few blog posts.

I tried it myself based on all the glowing comments here, but I didn't find it to be particularly impressive (not bad, but not great either). I also found myself using '!g' most of the time because the default results were inferior to those returned by google; in the end I just cut out the middleman.

So I guess I just don't get all the hype about DDG on Hacker News (same goes for bitcoin and the never-ending stream of Python non-stories). Maybe there's a cult-ish aspect to it?

Re: The curious case of DuckDuckGo

#92

Post by [deleted] »

puredemo wrote: post #19

I've said this for a long time, but I think the biggest thing holding back DDG from truly widespread adoption is the name and branding. No one is ever going to 'dukgo' someone. Searching is a verb, the naming conventions used with DDG in its current form just don't fly. I'd love to talk shop with Gabriel about the identity decisions, and whether he is open to pivoting the brand identity now that the service is gettin…

[deleted]

Re: The curious case of DuckDuckGo

#93

Post by mtogo »

IsaacL wrote: post #72
fbuilesv wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Before Google we never Altavista'd or Yahoo'd anything, I don't see why this has to be a problem. Also, please stop abusing the word "pivot" :(

I agree. Google became a verb because the search engine was successful, not the other way around. Furthermore: - Microsoft spent pots of cash trying to verbify their search engine with their "bing and decide" commercials. As far as I know, this hasn't worked for them. - IIRC Google themselves tend to use the form "do a Google search" - or they risk losing their trademark. - Duck Duck Go is a catchy name - three punch…

But my disruptive agile cloud startup is going to pivot into being more of a social media cloud platform!!1!1oneone

Re: The curious case of DuckDuckGo

#94

Post by mtogo »

thezilch wrote: post #17
Mithrandir wrote: post #4

One of the great parts of DuckDuckGo is that if you don't find what you're looking for, you can just type in '!g QUERY', '!b QUERY', or one of the other ~1400 !bangs. https://www.duckduckgo.com/bang.html

This feature is a builtin on Chrome and Firefox. One need not proxy, and eat overhead time, for specific searches through DDG nor Google, and the keyword configuration is also custom.

See my replies above, Chrome and Firefox's features are nice, but not half of what DDG's !bang commands can do.

Re: The curious case of DuckDuckGo

#95

Post by CapitalistCartr »

I loved Alta Vista. I had to provide the algorithm. Searches like: ((word AND word) OR (word OR word)) AND word. I could get it to do just what I wanted. Then Google came along and built the algorithm skill into their software. Now we complain that their algorithm isn't as brilliant as us, that we have to still think some.

If we want Google's software to do our thinking for us, it has to know all the relevant information that we do, necessitating a rather complete invasion of our privacy. If we want to withhold privacy, which means withholding data, we have to do some of our own thinking.

Re: The curious case of DuckDuckGo

#96

Post by ugh »

ansy wrote: post #20

This is really an example of taking Google's strengths and making them out to be weaknesses. Google's search algorithm is tuned to what actually works for most people. Does anyone search for Java and click on coffee links? Or links for Java the island in Indonesia? Based on these results I would bet not. The thousands if not millions of people that typed Java before you didn't want coffee or islands. They wanted the…

It’s questionable that in the case of Java the disambiguation helps much.

Here is what you have to do to get results for Java coffee if you are using Google:

Type “Java”,

parse results and see that you didn’t get the desired results,

type space, “c”, “o”, “f”

And DuckDuckGo:

Type “Java”,

press enter,

parse results and see that you didn’t get the desired results,

expand right category in the disambiguation list,

click on “Java coffee” in the expanded list

It’s a wash, it really is.

Re: The curious case of DuckDuckGo

#97

Post by pbreit »

pbreit wrote: post #52
ansy wrote: post #20

This is really an example of taking Google's strengths and making them out to be weaknesses. Google's search algorithm is tuned to what actually works for most people. Does anyone search for Java and click on coffee links? Or links for Java the island in Indonesia? Based on these results I would bet not. The thousands if not millions of people that typed Java before you didn't want coffee or islands. They wanted the…

Sorry, but Google's results are not defensible in these two cases. A search engine that spends a fraction of real estate to suggest specificity on rather generic term is performing better. It would be difficult to test but I suspect on a search for "java" that coffee or geography would fare better in relevance than the second half of Google's results. Likewise, it doesn't even make any sense to search for "college or…

To those who downvoted: is your position that Google's results are better in these two cases? Or that it doesn't matter? Or that the cost to match/exceed DDG's results outweighs the benefits? Or that since Google works differently behind the scenes it should not be expected to deliver these kinds of results?

Downvote? Really?

Re: The curious case of DuckDuckGo

#98

Post by bane »

puredemo wrote: post #19

I've said this for a long time, but I think the biggest thing holding back DDG from truly widespread adoption is the name and branding. No one is ever going to 'dukgo' someone. Searching is a verb, the naming conventions used with DDG in its current form just don't fly. I'd love to talk shop with Gabriel about the identity decisions, and whether he is open to pivoting the brand identity now that the service is gettin…

He should just rename it "Go"...it's both shorter than Google, works great as a verb "I'm going to Go to xyz site" meaning searching on the Go search engine is akin to a behavior many people already have -- searching for sites instead of typing their url.

Plus it helpfully further confuses the word "Go", it's a programming language, a regular old verb, and a search engine!

Re: The curious case of DuckDuckGo

#99

Post by Hominem »

puredemo wrote: post #19

I've said this for a long time, but I think the biggest thing holding back DDG from truly widespread adoption is the name and branding. No one is ever going to 'dukgo' someone. Searching is a verb, the naming conventions used with DDG in its current form just don't fly. I'd love to talk shop with Gabriel about the identity decisions, and whether he is open to pivoting the brand identity now that the service is gettin…

Yeah, I'll just keep on googling on DuckDuckGo. The way I make a xerox on whatever photocopier is around.

Re: The curious case of DuckDuckGo

#100

Post by alohahacker »

jonathansizz wrote: post #91
alohahacker wrote: post #80

its crazy that through marketing and all the push DuckDuckGo is getting that they only get searched 250,000 times a day. With the hundreads of millions of searches that go on everyday you would think they could pull a little bit more. I guess it truly is hard for people to change who they search with after all is said and done.

I don't think it's surprising. The only place I hear talk about DDG is on this website and a few blog posts. I tried it myself based on all the glowing comments here, but I didn't find it to be particularly impressive (not bad, but not great either). I also found myself using '!g' most of the time because the default results were inferior to those returned by google; in the end I just cut out the middleman. So I gues…

yeah same here. don't get me wrong i think its pretty neat and even have the duck app on my droid.

i guess its hard for me to switch since EVERYTHING i do is with g ( email, search, google+, etc.)

its more a convienience thing for me. but yeah i think it def is a bigger following on tech sites in relation to the average person.

Post reply on HN