duckduckgo search engine

[nslay]

http://www.duckduckgo.com/

I'm actually quite surprised. It seems to give more relevant results than Google. I've recently noticed Google's results are increasingly cluttered with crap.

It seems to be picking up in popularity and supposedly is one of Time's top 50 and pccmag's top 100, if that actually means anything.

I wonder how much of this is duckduckgo and not the other search engines it aggregates, or even how it protects your privacy (so it claims).

[Sidoh]

Cool!

[Newby]

I've got a friend that uses this religiously. I see no reason, really. I don't see the value in privacy on a search engine. I don't particularly care if people see what I search for. Perhaps there's another aspect of privacy that I'm missing.

[nslay]

I've got a friend that uses this religiously. I see no reason, really. I don't see the value in privacy on a search engine. I don't particularly care if people see what I search for. Perhaps there's another aspect of privacy that I'm missing.

Prospective employment, ID theft to name a couple. A less obvious effect of targeted advertising is that it can target the wrong user in your household (e.g. visiting friend, family members) divulging information about yourself (for example, medical issues).

I mean, it's conceivable that Google/Facebook could create their own "intelius" service, for example. I'm sure they'd make a killing on it too. An employer could see, for example, the types of things you search for, the types of things you comment on, the types of sites you visit, perhaps even estimate how distracted you are.

But my main concern has always been that Google/Facebook are information cache cows waiting to be hacked opening up all sorts of possibilities for ID theft and government profiling and/or retaliation (in oppressive countries for example).

Privacy is valuable because people tend to be judgmental. Some people in power can have adverse effects on your life if they learn something otherwise private about you. It could be anything as little as differing opinions on an issue, to political affiliation, to differing senses of humor.

[nslay]

I noticed that duckduckgo can use WolframAlpha inline to do calculations, however, I did not know it could do stuff listed here:
http://duckduckhack.com/

Now that's pretty cool!

[Sidoh]

That's pretty cool, although I'm not sure how useful any of the examples I saw were. This is especially true of the ones that Google doesn't do already.

I understand your argument advocating the importance of privacy, but it relies on the assumption that you care how people would judge you for what you search for. If someone would judge me for the things I search for, I wouldn't value a relationship with or employment from them.

I'll use this when I feel like Google is failing me, but, honestly, it's only gotten better over the years.

[nslay]

It's more interesting that you can write your own plugins that interact with the search engine. Google doesn't have anything like that.

EDIT:
Here's are new plugins being written:
https://twitter.com/#!/duckduckhack

A lot of them are trivial.

EDIT2:
http://duckduckgo.com/?q=weather+in+tallahassee%2C+FL

That's cool. It even has a weather "searchlet." I wonder how user-written plugins get incorporated into the search engine.

Anyway, I think this notion of "searchlets" shows a lot of promise.

[nslay]

More amusing tricks (but admittedly useless):
http://duckduckgo.com/?q=heads+or+tails
http://duckduckgo.com/?q=123+in+base+6
http://duckduckgo.com/?q=6+xor+3
http://duckduckgo.com/?q=127.0.0.0%2F24
http://duckduckgo.com/?q=random+number
http://duckduckgo.com/?q=random+number+between+0+and+10
http://duckduckgo.com/?q=length+of+the+amazon+river
http://duckduckgo.com/?q=reverse+this+phrase
http://duckduckgo.com/?q=solution+of+x^5%2Bx%2B1%3D0

[iago]

They're gonna fail because their name takes too long to type. I can hammer off 'google.ca' in seconds, but 'duckduckgo.com' is painful by comparison.

[Falcon]

They're gonna fail because their name takes too long to type. I can hammer off 'google.ca' in seconds, but 'duckduckgo.com' is painful by comparison.

This + some queries take noticeably longer to complete than Google.

[nslay]

They're gonna fail because their name takes too long to type. I can hammer off 'google.ca' in seconds, but 'duckduckgo.com' is painful by comparison.

I certainly hope not. If you want a shorter name, you can use http://ddg.gg/ ... not as nifty, but certainly fewer characters.

[nslay]

They're gonna fail because their name takes too long to type. I can hammer off 'google.ca' in seconds, but 'duckduckgo.com' is painful by comparison.

This + some queries take noticeably longer to complete than Google.

Yeah, but the infinite scroll, keyboard shortcuts, and !bang more than make up for those 0.5 seconds lost.

To play devil's advocate:
- ddg.gg is fewer characters than google.ca
- Google reports bogus statistics (e.g. # results fount) and makes you click "Next/Previous" or page numbers. But duckduckgo has infinite scroll, keyboard shortcuts, and !bang.
- Google results include lots of spam. DuckDuckGo evades parked domains by communicating with parked domain registries (I don't know the exact details of this).
- Google links can't be copied with "Copy Link" (because Google wraps itself into links)
- Google doesn't know how to communicate with external services (e.g. WolframAlpha, Weather, etc...)

On the other hand, Google does have a nice cached page view. I haven't figured out how to look at cached pages in DuckDuckGo.

I think DuckDuckGo is very interesting and I think it has a lot of new features to offer.

[Sidoh]

How often do you actually have to type the URL? I almost never type full URLs. After using a browser for a while, I either use a bookmark button or type the first letter or two of the URL, which is enough for my browser to know what I'm looking for.

To search Google, I almost always type it into the URL bar in Chrome, which does a Google search.

Not sure if you were being serious, but I certainly don't think that's a very good reason to think they'll fail.

If they do fail, I think it'll be because they don't have the engineering or financial resources to scale like Google has.

They're gonna fail because their name takes too long to type. I can hammer off 'google.ca' in seconds, but 'duckduckgo.com' is painful by comparison.

This + some queries take noticeably longer to complete than Google.

Yeah, but the infinite scroll, keyboard shortcuts, and !bang more than make up for those 0.5 seconds lost.

To play devil's advocate:
- ddg.gg is fewer characters than google.ca
- Google reports bogus statistics (e.g. # results fount) and makes you click "Next/Previous" or page numbers. But duckduckgo has infinite scroll, keyboard shortcuts, and !bang.
- Google results include lots of spam. DuckDuckGo evades parked domains by communicating with parked domain registries (I don't know the exact details of this).
- Google links can't be copied with "Copy Link" (because Google wraps itself into links)
- Google doesn't know how to communicate with external services (e.g. WolframAlpha, Weather, etc...)

On the other hand, Google does have a nice cached page view. I haven't figured out how to look at cached pages in DuckDuckGo.

I think DuckDuckGo is very interesting and I think it has a lot of new features to offer.

I don't get the impression that DDG does its own indexing. It seems like it augments results from an existing search engine (Yahoo?) with some of its own data. It would therefore be pretty difficult for it to offer features like cached pages without just being an API proxy, which doesn't seem very useful.

I like the infinite scroll. I wish Google would've done that instead of instant search, which I find more annoying than useful.

[nslay]

I am pretty sure it does its own indexing (it has a web crawler DuckDuckBot), but it has a different strategy such that it somehow knows about content mills (such as parked domains) and ignores them entirely.

But I imagine that you're probably right that it aggregates results from other services too. I don't know to what extent it does this though.

[Sidoh]

I am pretty sure it does its own indexing (it has a web crawler DuckDuckBot), but it has a different strategy such that it somehow knows about content mills (such as parked domains) and ignores them entirely.

But I imagine that you're probably right that it aggregates results from other services too. I don't know to what extent it does this though.

I should add that all of the things I'm saying about DDG are taken from things I've read on their wikipedia article.

It does have its own bot, but I don't think it has an index of the entire web in the same way that Google does. I read that it has a bot, but I'm not sure what it does. Perhaps it crawls some small subset of really popular sites or something. There's no way they can maintain a reverse index of the web at the scale Google does given their tech stack is perl and nginx without some absolutely absurd hacking.