
DuckDuckGo and Wolfram Alpha are now official partners - admp
http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2011/04/duckduckgo-and-wolframalpha-are-now-official-partners.html
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epi0Bauqu
Here is the Wolfram|Alpha announcement:
[http://blog.wolframalpha.com/2011/04/18/wolframalpha-and-
duc...](http://blog.wolframalpha.com/2011/04/18/wolframalpha-and-duckduckgo-
partner-on-api-binding-and-search-integration/)

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slay2k
Awesome job. Ignore the haters.

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KaeseEs
DDG has haters?

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kgermino
Scroll down. Or don't, your not really missing anything by skipping that
thread.

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sorbus
There don't appear to be any DDG haters in the threads on this article. There
are two people who seem to hate (or at least dislike) Stephen Wolfram, though.

(Disclaimers: I have showdead on, this is accurate as of 9:31 PM, GMT).

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kgermino
I read it as haters of the deal rather than haters of DDG. For example,
thebooktocome made a comment saying that (s)he was done with DDG because of
the deal. Sorry if it was confusing.

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nosignal
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.

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sinaiman
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

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asmosoinio
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)""

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asmosoinio
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>

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ck2
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>

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epi0Bauqu
Thx -- will do.

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epi0Bauqu
Update: fixed.

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MatthewPhillips
The founder of the 3rd or 4th biggest English search engine responding to and
fixing issues from a HN thread. Awesome. _switches to DDG_

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Indyan
That is major motivator for using DDG. If you find something wrong, just tweet
it (or somehow convey it to Gabriel), and he be on top of it in no time.

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NovaDesu
Just wait till it gets bigger and he's unable to answer them

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HannoverFiste
_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.

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katovatzschyn
Is there a name for the Duck Duck Go duck?

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

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frossie
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 :-)

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

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epi0Bauqu
They seem to generally take a very long-term view of things and are very
reasonable.

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wcchandler
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.

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epi0Bauqu
That wasn't us actually :) <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2271580>

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suprgeek
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.

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cft
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.

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aw3c2
Third-party visitor statistics say nothing about the actual audience of a
website.

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markbnine
DuckDuckWolf?

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rguzman
DuckWolfGo

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

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thebooktocome
There goes my support for DuckDuckGo.

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eli
Err.. why?

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spitfire
Have you met Stephen Wolfram? He makes Donald Trump look humble.

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hvs
A major corporation with an arrogant CEO? Imagine that.

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jayzee
A major corporation with an arrogant CEO who _received a Ph.D. in particle
physics from the California Institute of Technology at age 20,joined the
faculty there, and received one of the first MacArthur awards in 1981, at age
21_. Lets cut him some slack for being awesome.

\-- _from wikipedia_

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hugh3
He is, nonetheless, considered insufferably arrogant even by the standards of
other geniuses (and CEOs).

Does any of this matter for his products? Naah. Mathematica and Alpha are
good, and as for A New Kind Of Science... well, I doubt I'll ever bother to
read enough of it to find out.

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joshu
I spent two hours chatting with him at a conference recently. I did not
experience any arrogance, insufferable or otherwise.

