

Thirteen Million Wikipedia Paragraphs at your Fingertips - epi0Bauqu
http://duckduckgo.com/blog/wikipedia.html

======
smokinn
The info box is cool but the layout of it is really annoying. Since it's a
div, I can't resize it and scrolling to the bottom scrolls the page down as
well when I hit the bottom so the whole thing is very jarring.

It would be a lot better if the text were simply in a textarea instead of a
div so that I could resize the box (in Chrome at least, IE is screwed either
way) when I want to read it.

~~~
epi0Bauqu
Thanks for the suggestions--I'll give it a second look. It scrolls the box
first, then the page. But yeah, if you overshoot like with a mouse wheel, then
the page eventually scrolls. I was resistant to a textarea because people
think they are for typing in them.

~~~
smokinn
Hmm, you're right.

Maybe something like this then?

<http://jqueryui.com/demos/resizable/>

------
dkimball
I've noticed that these days, Google's answers to search questions are
generally "why don't you try Wikipedia?"

These days, the Web is somewhere between three and five titans plus a complex
of secondary sites (specialist wikis, newspaper sites, news aggregators, major
blogs), with a background noise that chiefly consists of spammers mirroring
90% of Wikipedia to improve their search-engine rankings.

So, in a way, this search engine is inevitable -- but I wouldn't have imagined
it as early as thirty minutes ago, so it's probably not inevitable, just an
idea so good that you forget that it ever didn't exist.

"Duck It!" seems to work _really_ well, too; I'm switching. My only concern is
that "Duck It!" doesn't include a way of telling you whether a given paragraph
is true or false...

~~~
epi0Bauqu
Good point on the try or false, which is why we don't promote that stuff into
the Zero-click Info boxes. I have some ideas on how to address that problem,
however. It should be one of the next major feature improvements.

You're absolutely right about major sites ruling content. However, I'd add to
that there are many vertical search engines that do a great job searching more
deep content in their verticals.

Originally one of the things I wanted to do was be a conduit to those engines,
but throwing the user there proved too jarring a UI experience. So all that
code was commented out. I'm now looking for good ways to revive it.

~~~
dkimball
From playing around with DuckIt, I agree, there's more information out there
than I'd imagined -- it's just strangled by a thick forest of spam, which you
have devised a superb method of clearing.

My comment on the accuracy of zero-click info was inspired by an "acid-test"
test search that turned up some zero-click information that was excellent, but
some that was howlingly wrong. "Iberians" produces _splendid_ zero-click info,
including a thumbnail of the Lady of Elche; "Y-haplogroup R1b" and "mtDNA
haplogroup H" also worked very well; but "Iberian race" turned up zero-click
info that's been refuted completely by genetic genealogy and was pseudoscience
even before then.

Of course, there's an element of "garbage in, garbage out" here. I would
hardly condemn a merely _mortal_ search engine for being less than up-to-date
on the very young (<30 years) and distinctly arcane fields of forensic
anthropology and genetic genealogy -- but Zero-Click Info mode makes it sound
like this is _your_ information, not _the Internet's_ information.

Perhaps you could add a disclaimer to the effect that your elite team of ninja
ducks has scoured the dark corners of the earth and returned with the best
information they could find, but there's still a risk that their findings are
a complete load of HealthBase?

(I would also _love_ to see a picture of your elite team of ninja ducks
returning from their investigations. But maybe that's just a sign that I'm
easily amused -- the kind of person who _still_ finds "All Your Base" to be
funny...)

------
mfcoyle
Very cool. I've been using it for a while, and DDG's Zero-click Info results
is like asking the smartest guy in the office: "Hey Bob, what is [INSERT
SEARCH TERM HERE]?", and having them respond with a relevant, informed, &
concise answer.

------
goodness
This is very similar to Powerset (<http://powerset.com>). They were bought by
Microsoft a while back for a fair chunk of change, so you might be on to
something.

------
Ygor
I switched to DDG to try it out - and have been using it very often since.

Too bad you don't see the text you are typing in if you're using a dark gnome
theme (the background of the input box is black, and the text is set to dark
grey). On google it's ok (white text).

The same thing happens here on HN comments, btw. :)

------
clistctrl
I really dig duck duck go, its possibly the greatest google competitor on the
net (in my opinion) I love the ajax populated results when you scroll, and the
results are usually pretty relevant. If I have any complaints, its that some
of the graphics seem less than professional. Anyways, while I've been watching
it for a while this feature encouraged me to make it my default search engine
in chrome.

~~~
epi0Bauqu
Thx! Any particular UI suggestions? I've been thinking lately of offering some
settings to change font sizes/faces/colors/etc. Would that help?

~~~
karanbhangui
Hey, I'd love your site, a lot of my friends have started using it regularly
over Google.

As for UI suggestions, I know you're trying to keep it cute, but I'd try to
use a little more serious design. I think a lot of people might miss the high
quality of the results. Even if you decided to keep the theme, I'd change the
Century Gothic font. I've been using a custom made stylesheet to modify that
thus far :P

~~~
epi0Bauqu
What's in your stylesheet?

------
tman
Does the same thing as Googlepedia does for Firefox. What impresses me more is
the "Try search on" box on the right. It would be nice if that were
customizable.

~~~
epi0Bauqu
Thx! Googlepedia displays whole articles next to search results
(<https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/images/p/6210/>) and not relevant
paragraphs.

