DuckDuckGo Cooks Google's Goose

http://www.thestreet.com/story/11550975/1/the-digital-skeptic-duckduckgo-cooks-googles-goose.html

by bastardsage • 14 years ago

51 84 14 years ago

andywhite373• 14 years ago

Am I the only one that struggles with the name "DuckDuckGo?" The unprofessional name makes it really hard for me to want to use the service, even if it has nice targeted results that may be more relevant or higher quality than Google's. Maybe "unprofessional" is not the right adjective, but I can't find the right one. I have the same problem with "Bing" - the logo is just such an eyesore, and the marketing is so obnoxious ("Decision Engine?").

EternalFury• 14 years ago

Relevant search results is all I care about when I use a search engine. (Oh, and I don't see how "Google" sounds professional.)

andywhite373• 14 years ago

I agree that the content is what matters, but I just feel like it's a crying shame that a service like DuckDuckGo will never be taken seriously because of its name.

nsmartt5• 14 years ago

You aren't. I've seen the debate a few times on HN, and I've had it with friends who also opt to use DuckDuckGo.

It's "a bad name." It isn't evocative, it can't be (easily) made into a verb, and it lacks brevity.

I don't really like the name, but I'm oddly comforted that I can shorten it to ddg (and use http://ddg.gg). I can deal for now, but I do think it should change.

blantonl2• 14 years ago

Am I the only one that struggles with the name "DuckDuckGo?"

You know, there is a company called "Yahoo!" which did OK for a while.

GlennS• 14 years ago

It would certainly prevent me from recommending it to friends. Just too embarrassing.

cdmoyer• 14 years ago

I think the name is the only reason I remembered it long enough after hearing about it to try it and eventually switch. I have had no issues recommending it.

andywhite373• 14 years ago

That's a good point, the name is definitely memorable.

jebblue5• 14 years ago

It looks like a cheap knock-off of Google and doesn't give me the hit count for "Ubuntu" (or I missed it). Google gives me over 200 million, Bing over 44 million.

thematt2• 14 years ago

How is that in any way a useful statistic? Who cares about 200+ million results vs. 44 million? Most people don't look at the fifth result, let alone the 200 millionth one. What matters is the first page and whether those top results are the best and most relevant for a given query.

jebblue5• 14 years ago

It's useful to me, I've looked at it for over a decade, I want to get a good feeling that my search engine is doing everything it can to scour the Internet and is not filtering my search results out, they prioritize and that's cool.

runako• 14 years ago

>> Google gives me over 200 million, Bing over 44 million.

Is that relevant to your evaluation of a search engine? I don't care how many hits the engine shows, just what it shows in the first 3 links or so. The rest is noise.

jebblue5• 14 years ago

You bet, you can't plan a trip to the farthest reaches of the Universe on only a few data points.

wahnfrieden• 14 years ago

Just so you know, at least Google's hit count is usually off by several orders of magnitude. It's comforting to see it, but it's almost entirely inaccurate.

jebblue5• 14 years ago

I've seen out field (ok outlier) data points end up making all the difference in the end. That's why it matters to me.

Aloisius• 14 years ago

Google gives me over 200 million, 9 which are useful, Bing over 44 million, 10 which are useful.

There, fixed that for you.

jebblue5• 14 years ago

You fixed it for you, not for me. DuckDuckGo does not tell me the data pool they are recommending results to me from. That is huge to me.

rainysunday• 14 years ago

As far as I know DDG uses mainly the BOSS API. When I tested the BOSS API for http://kligl.com I found that the reported result count was consistently lower for BOSS compared with the (still) free Bing API, even though the underlying data is the same. That's probably why it is not reported on DDG. Both only give you the first 1000 results max so it makes no difference in practice.

sp3322• 14 years ago

Google's hit counter is inaccurate, and it still won't show you any results past the top 1000. What are you using it for?

adgar• 14 years ago

I've never seen someone describe a middleman so enthusiastically.

Not that there isn't enormous added value in presentation or that duckduckgo has a poor offering at all - but your search result quality will always be limited to that of your partner-competitors' (Bing index in this case). And the more you succeed, the more expensive your partnership grows: see Netflix.

Wait a minute. I just remembered the other added value: privacy. Now that I think about it, I know a few middlemen/middlewomen that I'd describe enthusiastically myself!

duckduckgouser• 14 years ago

I think middleman is a bit harsh. DuckDuckGo is providing a service. It isn't something that someone else can easily do themselves.

tferris3• 14 years ago

Which service?

Taking the Bing API, building a frontend, a parser for few shortcuts and get some VCs to blog about me?

Sounds like a project from a 48h hackathon.

einhverfr• 14 years ago

The question I have is as to their business model.

There's a saying--- if you aren't buying a product, you are the product. So they have one paid link per page. Is that enough to make them profitable eventually?

thematt2• 14 years ago

I don't see why not. Their costs are probably minimal (some servers + salaries). Beyond that they're just leveraging all the work of Bing and others. Also, they've taken barely any VC money, so it's not like there's a huge return expected in the first place.

adventureful2• 14 years ago

Nice to see DuckDuckGo get more media exposure, however that article was disappointingly short and lite. Seemed to cut off abruptly.

suking• 14 years ago

I'm so sick of these DDG stories. The truth is no one uses them, 99.9999% of people outside SV have never heard of them and currently there is no reason to switch to them.

glesica4• 14 years ago

I switched. For 80-90% of my queries it gets me to the same place as Google just as quickly, or more quickly in some cases. For the other 10-20% there's the !bang syntax, which also lets me search images and maps right from the Chrome address bar without ever hitting the mouse.

Use the tools that make you most productive. For me, that's DDG. For you, maybe not. But I think "...there is no reason to switch to them" just isn't accurate in general.

Garbage• 14 years ago

For 80-90% of my queries it gets me to the same place as Google just as quickly, or more quickly in some cases

By quickly, do you mean in less time (search speed is more), or in fewer clicks (search quality is more / relevant links are above)?

there• 14 years ago

Unfortunately for me, the most used !bang function was "!g" to re-run the search on Google. I used DDG daily for months as my default search engine and on about half of all my queries (most of them technical searches), it would give poor enough results that I'd scan the page, re-run the query with "!g " and find a useful result on Google in the first or second listing.

I finally admitted to myself that I was wasting too much time having to run so many searches twice and I switched back to Google.

nsmartt5• 14 years ago

>currently there is no reason to switch to them

How so?

DDG offers privacy, something that Google and other big search engines do not. That is more than enough reason- especially with growing privacy concerns in the US.

iosctr• 14 years ago

If you just want Google results with privacy, you could try https://startpage.com

aero142• 14 years ago

My dad came to me just the other day and told me he didn't like the stories about Google recording every page he searched for, so I told him to use DDG. Heck if I know how big the market is, but if my parents care without me telling them, it has a better chance than most of the startups I hear about on Hacker News.

dwc• 14 years ago

Sheesh. This was true of Google in the late 1990s when I was telling my coworkers to use it. If everyone listened to people like you then we'd be using Yahoo! and Altavista today.

tedunangst• 14 years ago

The difference is that Google was actually better.

sounds• 14 years ago

I don't see DDG taking Google's search crown. But it could happen the way Firefox opened the barn door - then other browsers came to take the crown (Chrome, for example).

[1] indicates DDG uses third-party APIs for deep web searches. To me that sounds like how Inktomi was a "search engine API" and neither Inktomi nor Yahoo saw Google coming [2].

Even if DDG doesn't succeed, Google is now at the top of the hill and therefore is _the_ target for all competitors.

[1] http://help.duckduckgo.com/customer/portal/articles/216399-s...

[2] http://diegobasch.com/a-relevant-tale-how-google-killed-inkt... and HN discussion http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3924609

nextparadigms• 14 years ago

Last time I tried both, I liked Blekko a lot more than DDG. So unless the "don't let ads track me" becomes a huge issue - like 100x bigger than it is now - I doubt people will be switching from Google to DDG.

zecho• 14 years ago

I don't think DDG needs to take anybody's crown to be successful. It provides a service to a few niches, mainly the tinfoil hat types and to people who mostly use Google as an intermediary to find wikipedia articles or posts on stack overflow and want a low-friction alternative. Or there's me: I mainly prefer the keyboard shortcuts.

Anyway, my point is that 1% of the search market is about half a billion dollars in revenue.

It'll be interesting to see if Gabriel keeps up with the affiliate model or moves toward an in-house ad solution.

codeka• 14 years ago

The thing I don't understand is, for all that DDG does, there's really nothing that Google and/or Bing couldn't just copy wholesale if it were really that great.

The ONLY thing DuckDuckGo can do that Google won't is "privacy" (maybe "less ads" is another thing). While that might be reason enough for some people to switch, it's barely going to make a dent in Google's dominance.

hrktb• 14 years ago

Sometimes the value can be in what you don't do, e.g. keeping things simple.

lubujackson• 14 years ago

Reading all these comments made me wonder... If DDG uses the Bing API and is passing the search term to whatever search-related text ads they show, that's a pretty big blind spot for the privacy advocates. Because Bing still gets your search term and so does the ad network. What they don't get is your IP address, but as the AOL search dump proved, sometimes search terms alone are enough to identify someone. It's still a nice feature, but I wouldn't consider it a solved issue.

calinet62• 14 years ago

This would be wonderfully true if only their search results were anywhere near as good.

lambda2• 14 years ago

I tried setting my main search engine to DuckDuckGo once.

I switched back to Google after trying to search for maps and local results. One of the really important features that Google offers me is Google Maps. Not having that kills DuckDuckGo for me, even if their normal search results were to work just as well.

zck• 14 years ago

In DuckDuckGo, searching for map! place I'm going to redirects you to google maps with the same query.

lambda2• 14 years ago

Yes, but with Google, I don't have to think about that; I just type "place I'm going" (which is frequently copied & pasted, so I'm not even typing, and adding "map! " would be a separate step), and I'm done. And it's not just for maps; it's also local results, like when you search for "japanese food some place" and get a list of several places with a map and aggregated ratings. For instance, when I do "japanese food place I live" on Google, I get a bunch of relevant results with star ratings, and the best one is on top. When I do the same on DDG, I get links to several other restaurant aggregator sites like GrubHub, Yelp, Urbanspoon, and so on, plus one link to a restaurant that only lasted a few months before closing.

If I'm going to do "map! place name" in order to get map results, I might as well just use Google; DDG isn't adding anything. Google is a place where I can type "thing I'm looking for", and get, most of the time, the answer I'm looking for, while with DDG that's just not true.

nsmartt5• 14 years ago

This is where the !bang syntax comes in handy.

In areas where ddg isn't quite "there," they offer the !bang syntax.

!gm {query}or !gmaps {query} will redirect you to Google maps.

fchollet• 14 years ago

DuckDuckGo has a tasteless name, tasteless logo, and awful webdesign. That alone is enough for me not to switch.

I believe the idea of integrating and presenting results from various specialized sources has a bright future in search, but DDG doesn't handle it very well right now. It might be in the future Google will leverage the same logic to improve its search experience. Google's "Knowledge graph" seems to me to be a step in that direction.

And when Google does it, chances are that it will outperform years of DDG's effort in mere weeks.

blantonl2• 14 years ago

Ok, so how does DuckDuckGo generate revenue?

jrockway• 14 years ago

By selling ad space.

sevenstar• 14 years ago

Go DDG!

tferris3• 14 years ago

What I like about DDG:

- Somebody is trying to improve the search engine space which is too long dominated by just one party (which admittedly makes a damn good job)

What I don't like:

- I don't see any improvements

- Don't like their name

- Crappy logo

- Too long domain name (with some skills and little money, a great 4-letter dot com is a no brainer)

- The product is awkward to use: the entire UI is the #1 reason to leave and aesthetically not pleasing, too many colors (red, blue, green), no CI, favicons are distracting, screen real estate isn't used effectively, mouse over effects are distracting and feel like clumsy Web 2.0 sites in 2005 => even Bing's new interface is very much nicer

- Search results got better but seem to lack any relevance algorithm such as Google's Pagerank

- Shortcuts are nice but more some kind of an gimmick than real revolution and they are not helpful at all because people who do not use DDG regularly forget them: either they have to be displayed all the time somewhere next to the results or directly on the landing page or they have to be consistent and expressive as Google's syntax which is "site:<site_to_be_searched> query"—if this shortcuts are one of DDG's main features then they have to tell it.

- No autocomplete, no instant search

I think DDG's and the team main problem is a heavy lack of product vision—they just think search is a great business model (yes it is) and they want to do something to just be better than the market leader. And this 'something' is their biggest weakness, they just don't know what to improve, on what to focus. Google's search is so good, that it's gonna hard to improve but still there are some fields where Google can be beaten (anonymous search, irrelevant results for longer queries because of SEO gaming/blackhat). Instead they just brought up a really ugly design and the user wonders all the 15 seconds he's exploring DDG why he should use DDG.

DDG has to pick one of Google's weaknesses and focus just on this and they have also to position DDG accordingly and communicate this focus/USP heavily. Otherwise DDG is like G+ to FB, just a bad copy.

I can image how hard it must be to build a search engine from scratch, there's just too much tech involved and crawling all the web could take months even if you have hundreds of servers (imagine: Google crawls even smaller sites with more than 20,000 pages per day (!), how does anyone want to build such crawling power with little VC money and some hype posts from Fred Wilson??). But maybe that's the chance: a new player has to focus on something small—a feature, a content niche, whatever, just a MVP that is in its core much, much better than Google. Building and promising the entire Google search experience will lead to fail.

jaems332• 14 years ago

Google has four colours in their name.

The length of the url isn't that big of a deal to me. I just type 'du' and the first url autosuggested is duckduckgo.

tferris3• 14 years ago

> Google has four colours in their name.

Yes, but just in their logo, that's ok because the rest of Google stands behind the expressive logo, is clear, has lots of white space, decent colors etc.

Now go to DDG: read header, blue search button on result page and green search button on landing, what the heck?? Strange colors in the text results and this ugly duck, sorry but getting a really nice duck on freelancer.com or 99design from a talented artist is a job of 500 USD.

> The length of the url isn't that big of a deal to me. I just type 'du' and the first url autosuggested is duckduckgo.

No, it's a big deal even if your browser provides autocomplete, The domain is everything: their brand, their name and will used anywhere and all the time. Just saying "check duckduckgo for searching this and that" or "i duckduckgoed my name" to your friend or colleague is too much communication overhead, too many syllables for something which is too important in our lifes nowadays.

And those both points bug me, because if they haven't done their basic homework on the frontend side who tells me that they done them on the backend side where it is more important (relevance algorithm)—why should I trust DDG's search results if they are not able to setup a proper brand communcation and interface?

nsmartt5• 14 years ago

I do see improvements. I often see information captured from the top result and displayed in the box at the top of the search. I've had better results on ddg on numerous occasions.

http://ddg.gg

I don't have any further disagreements.

bowlofnoodles• 14 years ago

You can use http://ddg.gg if domain length is enough of an issue for you.

AgentConundrum• 14 years ago

> - Too long domain name (with some skills and little money, a great 4-letter dot com is a no brainer)

They do have ddg.gg as a short alias to the full domain, though that doesn't address the .com suggestion at all. For that, they also have dukgo.com which I thought was another alias, but it appears that's being used for a community platform now.

I think it would have made more sense to reverse those two domains and have dukgo.com point to the search engine itself, and leave the more esoteric ddg.gg domain to the community platform. People invested in the platform would have an easier time remembering the "weird" domain than the general public (i.e. the folks who they need to use the search engine) would.

ibotty• 14 years ago

nice summary of shortcomings. but for me the biggest one is missing: highly special search queries (yesterday: about erlang, rebar and obscure release building failures) return virtually no usable results. google was way better.

somehow related, i like that they include links to google below their search results.

moollaza• 14 years ago

Regarding the UI, have you looked at the "Settings" page? Most of the UI is fully customizable -- you can change almost all of the colours you see, you can even remove many features such as the icons, sidebar, 0-click box, even the ads!

You can also adjust the layout of your results: alignment, page width, font and font size, underlining of links, etc.

Clearly they've provided a multitude of options, you just need to try them out.

Also, they do allow site search using the same syntax as Google.

nico_h• 14 years ago

I love the name and the logo. The search result page is uncluttered & pretty enough.

rsingel• 14 years ago

Actually today DDG was totally useful. I was trying to find a result for "Marketly LLC DMCA" trying to run down the top company filing DMCA reports with Google. Google was useless. DDG got me to a Chilling Effects page. Lots of time when I use !G but today, DDG saved the day.

nostromo• 14 years ago

The comments on HN in the past few weeks have been so mean spirited. What happened? I chalked Facebook up to schadenfreude -- but DDG?

jaems332• 14 years ago

I have no idea. Even the Zuckerberg marriage thread was a disaster. I felt like some of those comments were from Yahoo news.

boyter2• 14 years ago

Perhaps HN is at the tipping point that killed Digg? I hope not. Or at least that PG enforces his right to ban people over comments that can only be described as hash and not constructive.

huhtenberg• 14 years ago

Just look at the contents of the front page. It's no longer Hacker News, it's mainstream Tech News with a bit of nerdy sprinkle. The older audience is heavily diluted with those who push pseudo-tech cruft (like a woman suing a VC) to the front page, the same people who also comment more and don't really get the spirit of the board. HN is at its tipping point. I am eagerly waiting for HN2... that's assuming one hasn't been started already and kept private.

dalore• 14 years ago

So what happened to slashdot, then reddit, and now hackernews?

pg• 14 years ago

http://news.ycombinator.com/classic shows what the frontpage would look like if we only counted the votes of people who joined HN in the first year. It looks pretty much the same.

The comments are declining though, I admit that.

tprice7• 14 years ago

DuckDuckGo Cooks Google's Goose

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