DuckDuckGo launches Search & Stories app

by Titanous • 13 years ago

140 73 13 years ago

k-mcgrady2• 13 years ago

Just give it a try. Seems like a nicely designed app. !bangs are nicely integrated and search works well. There are a large number of sources you can choose your 'stories' page to be populated from and it seems like it is surfacing interesting content.

lgray• 13 years ago

Is this news? I downloaded it a few days ago. When did it launch?

k-mcgrady2• 13 years ago

The current version was launched today according to the info on the Play store.

awesomifier• 13 years ago

So awesome. But please make an app for us BlackBerry Z10 users. Blackberry's encryption and privacy features is a nice fit with Duck Duck Go's anonymous search.

Don't forget us!

pearjuice• 13 years ago

DDG might be fresh, safe and secure and have nice features; its search is still very, very weak.

a1a4• 13 years ago

You forgot the most vital reason: They respect your privacy. I personally believe it's indeed worth wasting some extra energy while searching, in order to get that respect. Not to mention it's constantly getting better. I have used DDG as my primary search eninge for the last year, and seen significant improvement.

nfoz• 13 years ago

Disagree, I don't think their inferior search results have anything to do with tracking/privacy concerns. It's just an inferior (meta-)crawler (they don't do the crawling themselves). Crawling/weighting is extremely expensive, and it doesn't seem that anyone puts in nearly as much effort to this as Google. DDG simply don't have the resources to do so.

Edit: I should point out that DDG has been my primary search engine for a year, and for most searches its results are great or at least decent enough to answer my question. I fallback to google for fuzzier queries, e.g. when I don't know what I'm looking for.

BitMastro2• 13 years ago

I personally value a better service way more than my privacy, but everyone has the right to make their own choices, I guess.

tlrobinson7• 13 years ago

I set DDG as my default search engine a couple weeks ago. At least 25% of the time I give up and use Google.

I've even started instinctively switching to Google for certain searches I know DDG will fail on (particularly technical stuff)

DanBC• 13 years ago

I manage to find what I want most of the time using DDG.

I have had to adjust my search techniques, but I'm pleased about that because it's not just returning what it thinks I want, it's returning what I searched for.

I would ask that they consider adding a "search for results from [drop down list of countries]" option. I often get US results and not UK results.

DDG does have a feedback link, so if you want you can send information about what you searched for and what you expected to find. I accept that most people don't want to do that. Perhaps DDG need to add an easy frictionless "none of these are useful to me" button?

nashequilibrium• 13 years ago

I assumed they were using Yahoo's search api, which in turn is powered by Bing search according to the Yahoo-Microsoft deal.

landhar• 13 years ago

Just gave it a try... This is so much better than the previous DuckDuckGo app. Focusing on stories and leveraging the search capabilities of ddg is genious (at the bottom of every news there's a "suggested searches" menu with very useful suggestions).

Cherry on the cake ? HN is one of the available sources for stories!

nemoniac2• 13 years ago

This app goes against the grain of DDG.

Frankly I'm not interested in stories, I'm interested in search. I get my stories elsewhere.

When I start the app I want to have a keyboard come up so that I can type in keywords. I don't want to see stories or to have to tap a second time just to activate the text input area. Then I want the results to open in the external browswer of my choice.

Is there a DDG app that does this?

cainetighe3• 13 years ago

Thanks for the feedback. We take the ability to search fast very seriously. There are a few home screen options in the app -- just look at the settings. Also our mobile web site is still accessible and maybe preferred over the app altogether.

MikeCapone2• 13 years ago

Is there an iPad version of the app planned?

johnrob• 13 years ago

It would be a very straight forward assumption that a DDG mobile app would laser focused on quick search. I'm curious: how did the stories feature come to be?

te_chris• 13 years ago

Just remember that as useful as this feedback could be, there's probably thousands of people that disagree with him silently and are happy with it. I think it looks pretty cool FWIW (which is not that much...).

echohack• 13 years ago

Did you even try the app out?

You can change the options from displaying stories, to instead display recent searches, or to save searches.

In any case, the stories feature is quite nice, but I agree that it's feature creepy. I'd rather use another dedicated app for stories / RSS.

Sami_Lehtinen• 13 years ago

You don't need any additional app(s). Dolphin Browser already supports DuckDuckGo directly. Any other browser also should have search engine configuration options. (Don't you guys remember, I won't install your app discussion.)

d0m• 13 years ago

I'm a bit confused about the "Stories". What does it mean? Is it articles? Blog posts?

MikeCapone2• 13 years ago

If you go into the settings, you'll see a list of sources from which they pick stories (you can customize the list).

I think they did this to have an extra thing attracting people to the app on top of pure search. People are likely to spend more time in the app because of it, and thus use DDG for more searches.

You can turn off the stories in the settings and use it as a pure search app, though.

My question for Gabriel & team would be: Is there an iPad version planned?

cainetighe3• 13 years ago

Stories are showcased from over 50 carefully selected sources that focus on different types of content. For example, TIME and BBC are there, but so are Reddit Funny and BuzzFeed. We also aggressively prevent depressing and duplicate stories from appearing in the feed.

cinquemb• 13 years ago

We also aggressively prevent depressing and duplicate stories from appearing in the feed.

Huh? Duplicate I can understand, but depressing stories? Isn't that subjective? What happened to dontbubbleus[0] principles of not filtering? Did Fred want a better news reader?

And here I was hoping for a new way to experience search like giving 3rd party devs more freedom to implement plugins in search…

[0] http://dontbubble.us/

jffry• 13 years ago

Would you ever consider teaming up with the producers of This American Life or Radiolab to do some sort of curated story, perhaps centered around the issues of privacy in the modern age? I think you (collectively) could be in a great position to do an interesting take on the different angles of the story.

flippyhead• 13 years ago

I was also confused.

akavlie• 13 years ago

Anyone know where the images are coming from?

Most of them aren't pulled directly from the story. There are also copyright issues with images that make this legally tricky to pull off.

gojomo• 13 years ago

I'm curious too. But maybe a good licensing-aware image search facility can auto-match acceptable images to stories?

hkmurakami• 13 years ago

is there a way I can change the default Google now shooing on android (the one at the very bottom of the screen) to this?

oneof11111• 13 years ago

yep. install the app. google now should give you two options. select and set as default...

znowi• 13 years ago

Installed it right away and... I love this app! Looks well polished. Easy bang search with a list of available sites right there nicely grouped. A lot of news sources (HN included) and you can suggest more or add/remove any. Region bubble is supported, but disabled by default. Save recent is also disabled. Such care for user privacy is so surprising in mobile apps, it makes me giddy :)

dhruvbird• 13 years ago

This is neat! :)

exodust• 13 years ago

Very nice, really like the interface and story display on the home screen. Seems fast. I don't usually use apps for search, instead going to browser first, but I might try this app for awhile.

mikiem• 13 years ago

I don't want the app. Arrg! I am on my iPad and I can't get to what I assume is a web interface to this... Only a big ugly page with half-showing icons for how to download the android or iOS apps. Why can't I just exit out of the offer and see the desktop version? Rawrrrrr!

chj2• 13 years ago

Have been using DuckDuckGo for the last few days (because of the PRISM incident). I feel it just redirects the query to Bing and then displays the result. Can't take it seriously.

jabbernotty2• 13 years ago

It uses many different sources to get it's information. Bing is probably one of them, yes. What is it, that makes you feel you can't take it seriously? It does in fact do what it says on the tin, which is letting you search in an +- anonymous way.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuckDuckGo#Features

chj2• 13 years ago

Well, it should query more from Google. I often find it is almost identical from Bing, with poor results. That's the major problem. A minor one is it is very slow but I can live with that.

ciderpunx• 13 years ago

I apparently have to have an account on Google play to download this app.

Which means that in order not be tracked by Google (by using duckduckgo) I have to agree to be tracked by Google (by accepting their 'privacy' policy).

This seems to obviate the utility which I may have gained from using the app.

ddgtest• 13 years ago

Does this app use SSL?

DuckDuckGo launches Search & Stories app

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