

An Interview with DuckDuckGo's founder, Gabriel Weinberg - marioestrada
http://www.techspot.com/article/559-gabriel-weinberg-interview/

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dkhenry
I like DDG and I even converted chrome over to use it as its primary engine,
however, recently I am noticing more and more spam links and less and less
links that really matter. I think I am coming to the conclusion that DDG did
this is the wrong order. They are developing a great frontend and using others
backends, but to really beat google or MS or yahoo you need to develop a great
backend that can filter results well and troll the web efficiently then you
can put an awesome frontend on it.

I still think the real silver bullet will be to make a backend system that can
peer with other systems to gather data and can be customized to get deep
results from a small subset of the web that interests a particular user (
think corporation uses it for internal search and to make their site show up
better on a common front end). I even started a research project to begin
working with some of the things needed to accomplish it[1].

1\. <https://github.com/dkhenry/SimpleMapReduce>

~~~
Ralith
> you need to develop a great backend that can filter results well and troll
> the web

Trawl. The web gets trolled enough as it is.

~~~
Steko
Not to hijack further but 'troll' is technically fine there.

troll ... 4.(intransitive, fishing, by extension) To fish using a line and
bait or lures trailed behind a boat similarly to trawling; to lure fish with
bait. [from circa 1600]

<http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/troll#Verb>

~~~
nodata
It's not fine because "troll" would be recognised here as the standard
meaning, not the meaning from 1600.

~~~
culturestate
The fishing definition is still very much in use. See e.g.
[http://outdoorsportinggoods.poorfish.com/search?w=trolling+m...](http://outdoorsportinggoods.poorfish.com/search?w=trolling+motors?TrackingidPPCgadw12&gclid=CNmxqMj-_7ECFalDMgodJR0AEA)

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isaacwaller
I have never liked DuckDuckGo after seeing their advertisement tactics,
especially the "educational" <http://donttrack.us/> minisite. Apparently your
anonymous HTTP referer info (from Google Analytics?) will be sold to insurance
companies / appear in a background check? It is blatant fear mongering and
really made me angry.

~~~
stephengillie
It all goes into the huge (secret by law) national insurance database, which
is accessible by all insurers. All information gained by an insurance company
about an individual is put in there, and insurers are prohibited from
discussing it.

~~~
Jayschwa
Citation(s)?

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MikeCapone
I've been using DDG as my default browser for a while (though I sometimes
revert to !g to search google), and I'm satisfied with the experience.

The main thing that would really improve my experience would be if it was
faster. Google really spoiled my with the instant results and suggestions as
you type.

I'm also looking forward to them switching to SPDY as I always use the
encrypted version, and this should make it a bit more responsive.

~~~
Steko
Google has put so much effort into speed over the last 10 years that they
can't perceptively improve much in this department going forward. So DDG's
target is relatively stationary and closing the gap may be expensive but is at
least straightforward.

~~~
MikeCapone
That's a good point, though I'm afraid it might be one of those things where
diminishing returns mean that it becomes very very expensive to catch up, and
I don't know if DDG has the resources. Moore's Law should help, though, but
personally I haven't really felt (subjectively) like DDG has become much
faster since I've been using it.

~~~
Steko
The scale of capital investment needed is really only feasible in the context
of an acquisition or maybe a huge DDG boom stemming from a massive Google
privacy scandal.

~~~
MikeCapone
Probably. But just adding autocomplete and improving speed some (doesn't need
to be quite google-equivalent) would go a long way towards making the
experience subjectively better.

Another thing that annoys me is that they have ads near the top of the results
that don't load quite at the same time as the results, so I sometimes am about
to click on the top result but an ad pops up and pushes everything down making
me miss my click. If they could somehow avoid that happening, it would also
make the experience better.

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JohnsonB
DuckDuckGo has _really_ fallen behind Google in the zero click information
department, which is one of DDG's key selling points. DDG needs to have one or
more major competitive advantages over Google in order grow. Privacy is great,
but zero click is something obvious and usability orientated that really
stands out. I'm not going to use DDG if Google gives me more zero click
information no matter what; it just makes too significant a difference in
search experience.

~~~
boyter
What about things like,

    
    
      https://duckduckgo.com/?q=frequency+of+letters+in+The+quick+brown+fox+jumps+over+the+lazy+dog
      https://duckduckgo.com/?q=days+between+6%2F22%2F1979+and+10%2F5%2F1979
      https://duckduckgo.com/?q=hn+duckduckgo+interview
      https://duckduckgo.com/?q=php+xml_parser_create+example
      https://duckduckgo.com/?q=currently+in+theaters
      https://duckduckgo.com/?q=msft
      https://duckduckgo.com/?q=currency+in+panama
    

The only one I think Google does better is "currency in panama" however it
also gets the information wrong in the "zero click" answer. The only reason I
like that result more is the Wikipedia answer on the right is just more
appealing to my eye.

~~~
comex
Careful... for "hn duckduckgo interview", at the moment, DuckDuckGo shows a
HNSearch widget with three (stale) results, none of which is this page; no
relevant results appear in the main listing. Google has no special widget, but
this page comes up first in the main listing.

To digress a bit, zero-click is great when the information you want is
actually accessible with zero clicks, but it's very, very limited: as soon as
you need to click through to a website, special widgets can't compete with a
solid backend for regular search results. That's why I can hardly imagine
switching to DuckDuckGo...

~~~
moollaza
Hey, I'm the intern who implemented the HNSearch Zero Click plugin, so let me
explain the poor result:

A HNSearch (HNSearch.com) for "interview duckduckgo" doesn't return this
thread at all, in any of the results (even on a 'stories' only search),
however the one thing it does surface is your comment, because that exact
phrase was found in it. I realized we weren't showing the right comments, and
I found a very small bug which has now been fixed. So thanks for getting me to
notice that :)

However, if you search "interview duckduckgo's" (ie. the same wording in the
thread's title) the ONLY result returned is this exact thread (an HNSearch
limitation).

These same results are fed to us by the HNSearch API and so the fault lies
within HNSearch's search methodology (as far as I can tell). We're still
looking for a resolution to this, however, any suggestions are welcome!

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AtTheLast
I like what I've seen from DDG so far. I don't expect it to be Google, but it
seems like the search engine keeps getting better with each iteration.

With the launch of DuckDuckHack it will be interesting to see what people
build for the platform. Plus, I'm just excited to see a talented team take on
search.

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whichdan
I used DDG for a few weeks, but ultimately switched back to Google. It was
mainly for two things:

1) It's slightly slower than Google, which became more apparent after the
fifth or sixth search of the day.

2) No images integrated with search results. I didn't realize how often I
searched for images until I used DDG. At Google I usually get a few images and
an "Images" link to click. At DDG I needed to add a !gi to my query.

Like JohnsonB said, there really need to be another draw besides just privacy.

~~~
panacea
I've found I add !gi to my search string subconsciously nowadays, when I know
I want to perform an image search, whereas before I would enter my search
terms, wait until google had loaded its results and then hunt for the images
link to get the full image search results.

In some way it's 'trained' me to perform more targeted searches from the
outset.

The slight lag before getting results is noticeable though.

I'm going to stick with the upstart for the moment nevertheless.

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raghus
The article mentions $115K in _revenue_ last year. How is that close to self-
sustainable for a 10-15 person company?

~~~
dkhenry
They average 500% growth. If revenue also scales like that then they are well
on their way to profitability.

~~~
603techguy
That doesn't explain sustainability now.

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mark_l_watson
I purposefully use duckduckgo several times a year as my default search engine
for several weeks because I like to support alternatives to mega corps.

Google meets my needs better and their recent power search class was very
cool.

A little off topic but I have had more than a few fantasies about starting my
own micro search engine. Text analytics and knowledge management in general
have been an interest of mine since the early 1980s. What stops me is that if
I were to invest my personal resources in this I would want tens of thousands
of users getting value from my system every day, and frankly, I don't think I
could achieve that. Gabriel gets an order of magnitude more than what I would
hope for, so I hope that he is very satisfied with what he has achieved. Good
job!

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Mythbusters
This is one product I hope people really get behind. Good interface and smart
aggregation. Keep it up guys!

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petdance
Sad that there's no mention of the huge role Perl + CPAN play in their
infrastructure:

* [http://help.duckduckgo.com/customer/portal/articles/216392-a...](http://help.duckduckgo.com/customer/portal/articles/216392-architecture) * <https://github.com/duckduckgo/duckduckgo/wiki/DuckDuckGoPerl> * <http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=848999>

They've also been visible in sponsoring the Perl community.

------
pacomerh
Also, don't miss Gabriel's interview on Techzing
[http://techzinglive.com/page/423/techzing-68-gabriel-
weinber...](http://techzinglive.com/page/423/techzing-68-gabriel-weinberg-
duckduckgo)

