Let me Duck Duck Go that for you

by arst • 16 years ago

161 116 16 years ago

asimjalis3• 16 years ago

I tried http://lmddgtfy.com/foo and I got this message:

  Unhandled Exception
  An unhandled exception was thrown by the application.

simonk• 16 years ago

It looks like the URL should be http://lmddgtfy.com/?q=foo&v=

Although, yes a lot easier to remember your way.

asimjalis3• 16 years ago

True. Still an unhandled exception does not sound good.

stcredzero3• 16 years ago

That's the message VisualWorks Smalltalk uses to notify users of an exception.

mattmaroon5• 16 years ago

Or they could just change their name to something people would take seriously. Just a thought.

roc• 16 years ago

... because the search engine market has so long been dominated by serious-sounding firms?

gnoupi3• 16 years ago

The search engine market started before all the "serious people" started coming to the Internet, I think.

I think it is harder nowadays to make a fame with a name like this.

Legion3• 16 years ago

My first reaction was to agree with your point.

But I wonder if there are varying levels of non-seriousness.

Names like Google and Yahoo definitely aren't serious, but they also have a sort of generic quality. Not in a bad sense, I just mean they don't evoke a specific silly image in my head - at least not by themselves (when I think Yahoo, I see a big purple !, but that's by marketing design).

Duck Duck Go, though, doesn't have that same nebulous quality. There's something more concrete there, and more specific imagery that comes to mind. And I think that's why someone might react that way to the name and not to the names Google or Yahoo or Bing. It's less vague, and decidedly more Saturday morning cartoon.

Is that bad? I don't know, it doesn't necessarily bother me. But I understand why some people view it differently than the search engine names already out there.

iamwil2• 16 years ago

Google was a silly name for a while, and what do we think of it now?

Here, I'll invoke "Tara"

"The less confident you are, the more serious you have to act." - Tara Ploughman

cookiecaper2• 16 years ago

Well, "Google" rolls off the tongue much easier than "Duck Duck Go". "Duck Duck Go" is also hard to "verb", as it were. I don't have a problem with the mentioned silliness of the name, I just think it's too long and hard to say/write.

aantix• 16 years ago

Who is Tara Ploughman?

The seriousness of DDG is to make damn sure that when someone types in the word 'dog' or some other simple search test, that pointed, relevant results are returned. And for that DDG seems to be getting better at each day.

He's been very upfront about who he is (one man operation) with zero interests in storing personal tracking information (the antithesis of Google).

He is serious.

icey• 16 years ago

I think it's a matter of taste. A few people I've told about duckduckgo have mentioned it "sounded like a search engine's name" after I said that I thought the name wasn't that great.

mburney• 16 years ago

Actually the only reason I started using duck duck go is because the name sounds cool.

Hoff• 16 years ago

Pick some topic areas that are popular with some subset of the population. There are various groups that would welcome having certain search terms dropped from the indices and others that they favor weighted more highly, for instance.

There are any number of ways to go to cater to specific search audiences. Start up multiple parallel DDG analogs of Google's Blackle <http://www.blackle.com>; site, for instance.

For the business folks, call it PinstripeSearch or PrivateSearch or something suitable for the target audience. Graft a different presentation with conservative fonts and typography and tweak the search index ratings for the audience, and off you go.

There are any number of audiences for specific searches.

Yeah, the indexes get huge.

But then you also get to cater to and advertise to specific audiences.

arethuza• 16 years ago

Well, for what it is worth, I rather like the name. Memorable, easy to spell and with the right amount of humor.

tomkinstinch2• 16 years ago

Regardless of any meaning associated with it or how serious it sounds, "DuckDuckGo" takes a while to type...

pbhjpbhj• 16 years ago

He has dukgo.com as a short redirect.

po• 16 years ago

When I saw the title of this HN post "Let me Duck Duck Go that for you" and clicked on it, I was expecting a blog posting about how why DDG doesn't have an easy enough name to ever catch on.

I actually like the sillyness of the name but I'm not that fond of the name/logo of Duck Duck Go. I think it reminds me too much of Aflac.

Keyframe• 16 years ago

duckhunt is already taken!

asimjalis3• 16 years ago

I am curious. Is DDG running their own web crawlers or are they a front-end to search results from some other engine?

epi0Bauqu20• 16 years ago

Both.

epi0Bauqu20• 16 years ago

Stuff like this keeps me super-motivated. Thx Mike for making it!

lappie2• 16 years ago

I think ddg is a great initiative and like how you are going about it. I have been following ddg quite a bit and also on the reddit ads/postings. With a slightly long term view and clear focus I think it has a decent chance to compete with the big guys.

Having said that, there are two things I noticed which I don't completely agree with.

1. The interface - the fonts, layout on the first page somehow is very unreadable. I am not sure what the motivation behind this is, but imho even a copy of hte exact google serp fonts/layout should have been good enough. The only way ddg will stand out from Google is the quality of data on your serp. There is very little incremental innovation possible from the layout that Google already has for listing a list of links and text, and it also doesnt seem to be your focus anyways.

2. I think the auto extension of search results is a bad interface choice. A pagination interface provides a clear anchoring and also for most people the first 10 results are more than enough - anything more and the information becomes too overwhelming. Again I dont think this provides any more value from the Google interface and is bad from a cognitive overload viewpoint.

Just my two cents. Best of luck on ddg.

nfnaaron• 16 years ago

Subjectively disagree on point 1, I like reading DDG SERPs.

Subjectively agree on point 2, I find it a little disorienting not to be anchored to a page in the result set.

DDG is my default searchbar site.

ianium• 16 years ago

Subjectively agree with 1. I find that each result doesn't seem separate enough, as if it was just a bunch of text and not individual results.

Subjectively and strongly disagree with 2. I love being able to just scroll down to the second page of results, it saves a few clicks and lets me scroll quickly through a bunch of results so I can quickly gauge the quality of the search terms.

epi0Bauqu20• 16 years ago

Thx for the detailed constructive criticism. On 1, I disagree with the premise that you can't improve UI. It's a subjective thing but I strongly believe a non-negligible % of people would prefer a different UI.

That being said, wrt to fonts and sizes, I wonder if you like any arrangement after tweaking the settings? http://duckduckgo.com/settings.html

On 2, I get way more positive feedback on this than negative, perhaps 10/1, though I do agree there are issues around the edges.

yesbabyyes• 16 years ago

First off, this is really impressive! Great work!

I agree on 1, and I think that what works well for Google & co is the strong colors. Every hit starts with blue and ends with green. You don't have to pick the same colors, but I think that's what makes it easy for me to distinguish the results.

I also think that the results start way too long down. I want to see my top three results in, well, the top.

I do like the never-ending scroll, though!

gnoupi3• 16 years ago

Oh, great, one more condescending way to answer people when you are too lazy to provide a real answer but want to be """funny""".

Yay.

Seriously, if you are concerned that someone didn't make an appropriate search on Internet before asking for information, there are nicer ways to suggest that than that kind of sites.

cookiecaper2• 16 years ago

LMGTFY is just a tool -- it can be used in good humor or malice. This site, likewise, but it has the added benefit of promoting DuckDuckGo and producing brand exposure, and is therefore less likely to be taken as a slight; with LMGTFY, everyone knows what Google is, so they don't take that as an informative thing; with LMDDGTFY, few people know what DDG is, so they may just assume that the linker is humorously and conveniently promoting a new search engine out of personal preference.

gnoupi3• 16 years ago

I see the interest in promoting DDG, but the "let me take your hand and do that for you" is and will always be a bit condescending.

You can tell about a great search engine without that kind of approach, in my opinion. Because if your intention is good, this way is hardly the best, I think. Most will use it like others used lmgtfy, or a more strict "RTFM", years ago: as a "search yourself noob" end of discussion.

shimonamit2• 16 years ago

I wonder how they plan to monetize this...

epi0Bauqu20• 16 years ago

It's fun. Why does everything have to be monetized?

igorgue• 16 years ago

Some users take the "Hacker" out of "HackerNews" :-)

shimonamit2• 16 years ago

I was just having fun... hope nobody took it seriously. It is a goofy site and a goofy comment.

ippisl• 16 years ago

If you're not really devoted to monetizing it , you might be able to compete with google on ad quality. google's really into getting maximum money , so many times the ads suck.

You, on the other hand , could offer the most helpfull ads.i'm thinking of something like showing the disruptive companies for a service your looking for.

for example , let's say you're looking for a divorce lawyer. one option to save a lot of money is using an expert system software to generate the required papers. most people don't know about this option, probably because real lawyers outbid them in the ad market.

So knowing about the expert system option is very useful.

Of course , you don't have to show only disruptive ads , but an ad combination that offer the best knowledge for the user.

Now , if there's a way to make this scalable across many product types, you have a very powerful feature, one that the big search engines would find very hard to imitate, because it would hurt their profits.

helwr2• 16 years ago

Linkedin profiles with 500+ connections are still not at the top when searching for people names, some junk pages somehow get higher rank

epi0Bauqu20• 16 years ago

This isn't true across the board, e.g. http://duckduckgo.com/?q=gabriel+weinberg

In any case though, I'm happy to fix if you give me some specific examples to work with.

helwr2• 16 years ago

try "geva perry" for example, he has like 5 thousand connections and on google his linkedin profile is #3 from the top

resdirector4• 16 years ago

Quick question: what types of searches are better done through DDG than Google? I've tried a few searches, but haven't found DDG better than Google...is DDG superior only for certain types of searches?

jodrellblank• 16 years ago

If you search for the MD5 hash of an email address, DDG finds them on Disqus (if they exist there) and Google doesn't.

Only one I've actually noticed ;)

epi0Bauqu20• 16 years ago

You can also md5 an email http://duckduckgo.com/?q=md5+yegg%40alum.mit.edu :). More goodies at http://duckduckgo.com/goodies.html & http://duckduckgo.com/bang.html

epi0Bauqu20• 16 years ago

http://duckduckgo.com/about.html

Of course it is subjective, but it really should be better across a wide swatch of searches. I think it is most clear though on what is X searches. The information view (from the home page) goes even further on these type of searches and grabs topic summaries in real time.

Other areas where I think we do noticeably better on average are with names and long un-quoted searches (5+ words). Of course you can find counter-examples everywhere...

What I always suggest to people is to give it a week as your primary search engine. If you (or anyone) do/does, I'd really appreciate you getting back to me with your feedback.

resdirector4• 16 years ago

Very initial impression:

* I like the zero-click info.

* Is disambiguation redundant? Can't you just infer from history and location? Or is this against your privacy policy?

The single most frustrating thing I find about search engines is iterating a non-trivial search. It doesn't seem like DDG has an edge against Google here. I long to see a search engine that makes it easy to send a question off to Quora, Vark etc.

joe_bleau• 16 years ago

Last time I looked at DDG, it required javascript. That's a negative in my book.

resdirector4• 16 years ago

I used DDG for an hour, and although I like the zero-click, I'm going to change back to Google: I've had a few searches like this:

http://duckduckgo.com/?q=gwt+log+javadoc&v=

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=gwt+lo...

Which Google performs better at.

jacquesm3• 16 years ago

DDG seems to be less 'shopping biased' than google, and seems to do a better job of categorizing stuff.

I wished some search engine would implement a 'context' search though, that would really make my day.

Trying to find something like 'go' by keyword search alone is really a problem, you always have to add a bunch of other keywords in the hope that that will narrow it down enough, if you could just filter out those contexts that you're not interested in after the first search is over that would be really neat.

epi0Bauqu20• 16 years ago

http://duckduckgo.com/?q=go ?

stcredzero3• 16 years ago

I think of DuckDuckGo as a "budget airline" sort of search engine. It seems to be best at handling the "low hanging fruit" or the common case, but it does so with better presentation, more convenience, and no bells and whistles.

By contrast, Wolfram Alpha is more like an arctic bush pilot. Or maybe that's Cuil?

jacquesm3• 16 years ago

> Or maybe that's Cuil?

I think you mean 'cpedia'.

stcredzero3• 16 years ago

You are correct.

vaksel• 16 years ago

Someone should make one of those blind experiments where you pull in the search results from yahoo, bing, google and DDG, so people can do a blind test to see which search engine is better

eru3• 16 years ago

Already happened. People seemed to have preferred the bing search results, and the Google-looking page. Perhaps somebody can even find the reference for this?

epi0Bauqu20• 16 years ago

Google must have disagreed since they just made their page layout look more like Bings.

nostrademons• 16 years ago

Nope, they preferred the Google results:

http://techcrunch.com/2009/08/08/which-search-engine-do-you-...

epi0Bauqu20• 16 years ago

A lot of DDG results look fundamentally different and so wouldn't work in a blind test.

heyitsnick• 16 years ago

http://duckduckgo.com/?q=lmddgtfy&v=

varjag• 16 years ago

http://lmddgtfy.com/?q=%D0%B0%D0%B6+%D0%B4%D0%B2%D0%B0+%D1%8... and http://lmddgtfy.com/?q=%E4%BD%A0%E5%A5%BD+&v=i

throw an unhandled exception.

Seems like non-Latin character sets give it bad vibe.

RyanMcGreal• 16 years ago

Returns a server error when the DuckDuckGo page loads:

----

Server Error

The following error occurred:

[code=CACHE_FILL_OPEN_FILE] An internal error prevented the object from being sent to the client and cached. Try again later.

Please contact the administrator. \

----

http://duckduckgo.com/?q=test&v=

antirez• 16 years ago

Using DDG as a replacement for Google in the latest two months. I'm impressed. If it's better or not than google for certain types of usage, I'll let other users to decide (but it is better, for my usage). But what is truly impressive is how this guy build a search engine that works in a way that is comparable to Google for the end user, with limited resources.

Volt• 16 years ago

I find that Google gives me better results when it matters. So although DDG has been my primary search engine, there are times when I'll enter my query into Google and get something that better satisfies my information need as either the first or second result, whereas I might have to look further down the list on DDG.

That said, I do love DDG, and it's still my primary search engine after 2 months as well. I switched based on the privacy policy (no personally identifiable information retained), ability to use HTTPS, and the nice infinite scrolling implementation, and unless these things change I'll certainly continue to use it. The combination of these, plus the generally impressive quality of the search results, make it really great.

Kinda solidifies the notion that you can compete on more than just the content of the search results list.

Sirupsen• 16 years ago

It's easy to double check on Google with DDG, if you search for: !google hacker news

It'll take you to Google's results on Hacker News.

Indyan• 16 years ago

I like the search engine. I have been using it as my default for the past month. I just love the infinite scroll thing.

My only gripe I have is that it is slow. I have a pathetically slow connection and DDG is at least 3-4 times slower than Google.

arst2• 16 years ago

http://lmddgtfy.com/?q=let+me+google+this+for+you&v=

natep• 16 years ago

Sharing the link is really hard (at least for me, maybe I'm doing it wrong?). When I type something and click search, it takes me straight to the page I'd want to send someone, and I can't really select the url (because of whatever's moving the pointer?). So, do I just have to figure out the url scheme and write it out myself? lmgtfy just gives you the url to send someone.

arst2• 16 years ago

It doesn't actually move your cursor, just an image of a cursor. You should be able to copy & paste the URL out of your address bar as it is animating; you're right that just showing the URL after the user clicks 'Search' might be more user friendly, though.

motters• 16 years ago

I Duck Duck Went a couple of months ago, and have been going ever since.

blueben2• 16 years ago

Is DDG engaging in some sort of grassroots campaign to make sure they get a link on HN at least a few times a month? I get it. DDG is out there. They're an alternative to Google. Great. How about some articles with merit rather than yet-another-link to the search engine front page and a bunch of people gushing about it?

tsally• 16 years ago

In order to be qualified to make these sorts of comments, you either need to either (A) submit high quality links or (B) create something front-page worthy. Your last submission (out of a total of 3) was 59 days ago. And I don't see any links to projects in your profile. So pretty much all you're doing here is being negative; you're not taking any action to correct this quality "problem" that you perceive. DDG is an entire search engine coded by one dude in Perl. And it's pretty good too. I personally don't mind if it gets some time on the front page, even if just for the discussion.

Terretta• 16 years ago

> DDG is an entire search engine coded by one dude in Perl.

DDG FAQ: Q. How do you get your results?

A. From many sources, including DuckDuckBot, crowd-sourced sites, BOSS & Bing.

E.g., see http://developer.yahoo.com/search/boss/ ...

BOSS (Build your Own Search Service) is Yahoo!'s open search web services platform. Developers, start-ups, and large Internet companies can use BOSS to build and launch web-scale search products that utilize the entire Yahoo! Search index.

BOSS (Build your Own Search Service) is a truly open API with as few rules and limitations as possible. With BOSS, developers and start-ups now have the technology and infrastructure to build next generation search solutions that can compete head-to-head with the principals in the search industry.

epi0Bauqu20• 16 years ago

Nope. I didn't make this and I didn't know the person who did. Nor did I submit it.

blueben2• 16 years ago

Take pride in the fact that people love your work so much that they will spam their friends to share it. :)

senko• 16 years ago

Crashes on non-ascii input. Example (query is "rašić" in utf-8): http://lmddgtfy.com/?q=ra%C5%A1i%C4%87&v=

blahedo• 16 years ago

In the early days of Google, back while it was still beta, I remember having to go to my backup search engine—remember Altavista? :)—for queries where I just needed a boatload of sites, or where I had a complex boolean thing, or where I needed to search for a whole phrase.

Of course, back in the 90s Google knocked out my reasons to backoff to Altavista, one by one, adding boolean queries, and phrases, and of course adding a boondle of data. So I was eventually able to stop using Altavista.

For the last few months, DDG is my primary and I love it. I still use Google for:

* a few queries that DDG can't find anything for

* to find out what other people will see when they "google it"

* YouTube and maps.

YouTube will be hard to ditch because that's where the content is, although I suspect I can wean from maps if I actually try.

Let me Duck Duck Go that for you

Related Stories