

A 2001 Quote From Sergey Brin Explains Duckduckgo's Popularity - tenpoundhammer
http://www.tenpoundhammer.com/2012/02/2001-quote-from-sergey-brin-explains.html 

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farlington
It's really tough to switch search engines when Google's results are so good
the majority of the time. The crux of the problem is that you have to choose.
It's more arduous to navigate to a different search engine than it is to
repeatedly tweak your query until you get the results you want.

You really shouldn't have to choose search engines though. It'd be great to
have the option of seeing results from multiple search engines on the same
query, maybe in like split frames, it'd save so much time. I should get
started on writing a Chrome extension.

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DanBC
Have you seen "Blindsearch"?

(<http://blindsearch.fejus.com/>)

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farlington
No, and thank you, that's totally cool. It kind of illustrates the value of
having an extension that does this with omnibox queries. Without the 'blind
test' aspect, obviously.

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blktiger
I think many of the DDG search results are not very good, but when that
happens I just put !g in front of the query to search google instead. Other
search results are pretty awesome.

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mlwarren
The DDG !Bang feature is the reason I like to use DDG. I have it as my default
search engine in Chrome and I can search just about anything without having to
first load a site, enter my query, and click search. I just pop open a tab and
write one simple, concise query. Using DDG as sort of a "search portal" is
where I find the most value.

For reference, the !Bang list is very large. <http://duckduckgo.com/bang.html>

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suking
No one uses DDG - they must have hired a PR firm to get some BS stories
planted. their results are pretty terrible for the few tests I did the last
time their PR firm got something on HN.

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tenpoundhammer
I wrote this blog post, I'm not from a PR firm or paid by a PR firm. I have
been using ddg exclusively for a few days and really enjoy it.

Not everyone's use cases are the same, but for my normal everyday use it has
had excellent results.

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suking
Complete linkbait piece then, b/c DDG is anything but popular.

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tenpoundhammer
Seriously?

There have been several posts about it, recently, right here on hacker news,
John Gruber mentioned it in his podcast the Talk show, and it was also named
one of Time's best 50 Websites of 2011
[http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/completelist/0,29...](http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/completelist/0,29569,2087815,00.html)

How is that not popular?

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suking
Been around a long time, never caught on. Their traffic #s from compete are a
joke, even if they were off by a magnitude - still shows they are stale. They
should try something different than competing with google.

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epi0Bauqu
Hey, please email me at yegg@duckduckgo.com if you don't mind -- I'm the
founder. I'm interested why you're so negative on us. Here are our real
traffic #s btw: <https://duckduckgo.com/traffic.html>

~~~
AznHisoka
I got a question: is there a way to increase the number of default results
returned to a higher number?

