DuckDuckGo and Wolfram Alpha are now official partners

Haven't tried them in awhile - I must say the ui/results are much better than all my previous experiences - is it wrong that I really miss the estimated results at the top of searches?

Also, they need to disregard the Wolfram result when it's useless:

http://duckduckgo.com/?q=population+of+nyc+in+2020

epi0Bauqu8• 15 years ago

Thx -- will do.

epi0Bauqu8• 15 years ago

Update: fixed.

sskates• 15 years ago

That's pretty cool that you guys negotiated this and they were reasonable.

epi0Bauqu8• 15 years ago

They seem to generally take a very long-term view of things and are very reasonable.

wcchandler• 15 years ago

Congrats! I remember when WolframAlpha tried getting DuckDuckGo's app off the app store for linking to them... Glad to see them playing nice, now.

epi0Bauqu8• 15 years ago

That wasn't us actually :) http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2271580

markbnine• 15 years ago

DuckDuckWolf?

rguzman• 15 years ago

DuckWolfGo

katovatzschyn• 15 years ago

Is there a name for the Duck Duck Go duck?

If not, I find "Newton" would be rather apt.

frossie• 15 years ago

Is there a need to name him/her? I find myself saying "I'll ask The Duck" as the equivalent of "I'll google it". I don't feel I need to get more personal than that :-)

HannoverFiste• 15 years ago

Users of the up-and-coming search site DuckDuckGo know that the site is unique because it doesn’t track history, contains less spam, features a cute bow tie-wearing duck, and provides zero-click information that immediately pops up under the search box.

-- from Wolfram|Alpha announcement

Do not underestimate the bow tie-wearing duck feature. I'm sure Bing and Yahoo knockoffs are around the corner.

helwr• 15 years ago

very nice: http://duckduckgo.com/?q=x^2

sinaiman• 15 years ago

Great news, my suggestion: ditch the "time calculated" info on Wolfram results.

I personally don't care that something was "Computed by Wolfram|Alpha at Mon Apr 18 2011 19:31:47 GMT-0400 (Eastern Daylight Time)"

Just "Computed by Wolfram|Alpha" would suffice

JoelMcCracken• 15 years ago

I care, if its old. The knowing the age of data is very valuable when judging its relevance.

rbonvall• 15 years ago

Then, "Computed by Wolfram|Alpha two minutes ago" would suffice.

shasta• 15 years ago

It's important so that you can know exactly when it goes into the public domain

redthrowaway• 15 years ago

Interesting, I hadn't considered that angle. Are all W|A results public domain?

asmosoinio2• 15 years ago

Yes, or use a much lighter font on the WA timestamp, now it is too prominent.

As an example, try to parse this result for "fathers day 2011":

"Sunday, June 19, 2011 Computed by Wolfram|Alpha at Tue Apr 19 2011 08:31:06 GMT+0300 (FLE Daylight Time)""

asmosoinio2• 15 years ago

An improvement is already live regarding this, it used to have the same font size and color for the result and the timestamp. However I would personally make the WA date/time even lighter;

http://duckduckgo.com/?q=fathers+day+2011

Looks like this now:

http://www.webpagescreenshot.info/img/70578-420201195614AM

cft• 15 years ago

If you look at the traffic stats for WolframAlpha, it has the highest rank in Nigeria: http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/wolframalpha.com

I find this interesting.

aw3c2• 15 years ago

Third-party visitor statistics say nothing about the actual audience of a website.

nosignal• 15 years ago

This is potentially really good news. I've always loved the concept of W|A but hated the implementation. While very good at answering specific queries, it's no good at incidental or exploratory knowledge discovery - it's kind of out of the way, a little on the slow side, but most importantly it doesn't link externally (or even internally). I get the vibe that the W|A crew have an excellent idea and are doing an excellent job, but don't really "get it" when it comes to everyday usability. As they admit in their subtitle, they've built an engine, not a whole machine.

On the other hand, usability is DDG's killer app as far as I'm concerned. The focus on ease of interpretation as well as interaction is really valuable.

Simply having W|A's answer on the same page as a bunch of direct links to alternative sources is valuable enough.

But if I get a bit excited, if the power of the vast knowledge & computational ability of W|A finds its human voice through DDG, it could start to bridge the gap between "search" and actual knowledge retrieval. It's one (good) thing to remove 1 click by showing a number relating to a simple query - it's another thing to remove 50 clicks and 45 minutes of research and assessment to establish the answer to a one-step-above-simple query.

What I'd love to see as a start is for W|A to provide facts & figures against results returned through DDG. Eg. Search the web for "most popular travel destinations in europe", and be able to summon demographics, exchange rates, even trip prices for each result.

suprgeek• 15 years ago

This is great news! I have just one request - please never sell out to Goog, Yahoo, or Bing. We need a clean independent alternative and DDG is it for me.

DuckDuckGo and Wolfram Alpha are now official partners

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