

How DuckDuckGo got in Time's best websites - petercooper
http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2011/08/how-duckduckgo-got-in-times-best-websites.html

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petercooper
I'm surprised the title got changed back. It was originally "How DuckDuckGo
got in TIME's 50 Best Websites of 2011" and this more accurately reflects the
reality. I don't think that's "gratuitous editorial spin" as warned against in
the HN guidelines but, indeed, a _reduction_ of spin.

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epi0Bauqu
Me too. On the blog side, I had went with the shorter title because I hate how
it looks when it wraps. However, I just checked and that fits so I changed it
to your title.

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hollerith
You mean that it fits on your choice of browser at your monitor resolution and
text-size setting; right?

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epi0Bauqu
No, my blog is fixed width.

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hollerith
It's not important, but now I am confused.

In my browser, the title of the OP, namely, "How DuckDuckGo got in TIME's 50
Best Websites of 2011", takes up 3 lines because I have my browser set for
really big text. If I decrease the text size one step, it goes down to taking
up 2 lines.

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epi0Bauqu
I'm talking about the title on my blog site, not on this site. By fixed width,
I mean that when you resize the browser it does not compress the size of that
block of text, and so doesn't wrap/unwrap in that process. When I do
zoom/unzoom it doesn't wrap/unwrap for me either.

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hollerith
I'm talking about the title on your blog site, too.

"When I do zoom/unzoom it doesn't wrap/unwrap for me"

It does for me, though. But again it's not important (to me).

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bmac27
Spot on about Twitter being underutilized. RT'ing those same journalists'
stories (within reason and with your readers' interests in mind, of course)
can also get you in their good graces. I was able to secure a guest posting
spot with WalletPop (AOL's recently deceased personal finance blog) after the
editor at the time sought me ought based on all of the RTs, FFs etc.

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quizbiz
Soon enough, everyone will be doing this and it will no longer be a way to
stand out. But the blog post is probably one of the best articles I have read
on relationship building with journalists (Thank you Gabriel for continuing to
be so open).

Rather utilizing Twitter to suck up to journalists hoping they notice, I note
how DDG has created an online community that advocates loudly and clearly.
Read: DDG has users that feel apart of the brand so much so that they engage
journalists.

DDG's strong community is obvious here on HN and the internal forum is a great
idea too. Credit to Gabriel for knowing not just the importance of being
transparent but also HOW to express himself and his brand.

I'm only wondering how this can be applied to B2B brands where it's harder to
gain traction with people that have the time to advocate.

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thematt
I'd love to see the traffic numbers that resulted from that article in Time, I
always wonder how effective print media is at converting to visitors.

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jordank
We put all of our query numbers up at <http://ddg.gg/traffic.html>.

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rednaught
Thanks for sharing! You've had nice continuous monthly growth with the direct
queries. API usage seems to be hovering at 10M...any reasons for that? Was the
jump in direct queries between December(2.4M) and January(5.1M) a result of
the Donttrack.us site?

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epi0Bauqu
API usage has been mainly driven by one huge set of extensions, namely
<http://smarterfox.com/>. So while more people start using our API, a ton
would have to use it to move that needle.

The graph is annotated (though sometimes it doesn't come up). The major uptick
in Jan was due to the donttrack.us site and the associated billboard and its
associated press (a couple weeks after). You can see it in the daily #s very
clearly if you scroll down.

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seles
Since this is turning into a bit of a FAQ, I'll ask something I've been
wondering. DDG is dependent on its competitors. If DDG gains significant
market share, what is to protect it from them just blocking it?

Obviously there is a symboitic relationship with some of its sources, but not
all. How does Google/Bing benefit from it using their results?

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product50
I believe DDG uses Yahoo! BOSS (<http://developer.yahoo.com/search/boss/>) as
one of its primary indexes (check out DDG's FAQ). BOSS is a pay per use model
(as due to Yahoo's deal with Microsoft, BOSS needs to charge to cover cost) -
so it benefits Yahoo! directly. Also, now that Yahoo is out of search
crawling/indexing business, it is not really concerned about DDG becoming a
competitor - in fact it is a validation of the BOSS model which is something
Yahoo will like to promote.

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epi0Bauqu
That's right. A couple of other data points. a) Ask/AOL also don't have
crawlers and have significant share. b) There are a few places to get a decent
base page rank feed now, and it appears to be increasing.

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alagu
DDG is very clean and spam free, but I am being pulled back to Google for the
tighter integration across products (Videos, Maps, Images)

I search for "San Francisco to Los Angeles" in the url and then I click on the
map tab at top left. DDG proxy is good, but it demands me to memorize the
shortcuts (the shortcuts list is impressive).

Adding a contextual proxy in the results page would help i.e "Did you mean !m
San Francisco to Los Angeles"

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eric-hu
That's a really good point.

I think it's quite possible this could be leveraged to corner a niche market,
though. Think of people who use Unix--they can do tons with it, but there's a
ton of commands to memorize compared with what's necessary for Windows. Some
people _prefer_ having a more complicated and specialized toolset.

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epi0Bauqu
Indeed -- we should be getting a lot better at this over time. Thx for the
feedback.

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daimyoyo
How exactly does DDG make money? You aren't storing search info so I can't
imagine that any ads would be very targeted. Is it a "Scale then revenue"
plan?

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Mithrandir
The FAQ says:

 _How do you make money?

A couple of ways. First, there is some minimal advertising in the right column
with providers that work within our privacy principles, i.e. no targeting or
sharing IP addresses to serve ads. The other way we make money is via
affiliate sales, e.g. Amazon and eBay. This affiliate model also doesn't share
personal information -- see our privacy policy for details. _

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Pointsly
Hey Gabriel - 10 years from now where is DuckDuckGo? What's the vision?

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epi0Bauqu
10 years is too far out for me to speculate. In 5 years, I'd like to see us
have significant market share on desktop, mobile and tablet. To get there
you'll see us focus on the things we've been focusing on, i.e. working with
partners and our own indexes to deliver way more and better instant answers
from a variety of sources; way less spam; real privacy; and a simpler UX.

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docgnome
> way less spam;

That is exactly why I love DDG. I almost never get spam, but the fact that you
want to make it even better is so awesome. Seriously, DDG's killer feature is
a founder interacts with the users.

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pbhjpbhj
> _Seriously, DDG's killer feature is a founder interacts with the users._ //

Doesn't scale well, how sustainable is this going forward.

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stcredzero
In other words, how much fun are you having, and how long is that going to
last?

EDIT: A legitimate question, as Gabriel has cited fun as one of the perks of
going DDG. How are people reading this as a negative comment/question? It was
meant as a prompt to respond to the parent.

~~~
epi0Bauqu
I could not imagine a better job.

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siphr
I am not surprised. DuckDuckGo is a pretty good search engine. I am getting
more and more dependant on their bang "!" syntax.

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pbhjpbhj
> _I am getting more and more dependant on their bang "!" syntax._ //

Doesn't that mean DDG is a pretty good proxy.

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mxavier
Exactly. I only really lob softball queries at DDG. I use ! to go to the first
result on queries I know are going to have the right match first. Everything
else I proxy to google through !g. DDG is great but the search quality (or
perhaps the size of the data they index) is just not nearly up to par with
Google.

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avar
This is a shameless plug, but using !g constantly on DDG led me to write
GooseGooseGo, a trivial wrapper for DDG you can clone & run on localhost:
<http://goosegoosego.com>

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alain94040
Clean, simple, efficient, grassroots PR. And of course, you need a decent
product, not some web 2.0 hyped local global widget.

We can definitely learn from Gabriel.

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tententwenty
One thing that annoys me with search engines including DDG is where they
return results for the word they reckoned I meant to enter rather than the
word i did enter.

So if I enter axemple.com I get a pile of results for example.com and an
option to see results instead for axample.com

In the past they would have showed me results for what I actually typed with
an option to see results for the other.

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tristanperry
That's awesome, many congrats.

Whilst Twitter is (obviously) now very well known, you are right that many
people underestimate it from a communication point of view.

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cpeterso
Is DuckDuckGo self-funded?

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cpeterso
Yes:

 _DuckDuckGo was solo-founded by Gabriel Weinberg in February 2008 and is
based out of Valley Forge, PA (USA). It has been self-funded to date._

<https://duckduckgo.com/faq.html>

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eurohacker
Can you give a little insight about the algorithm ( good question - isnt it )
?

I have a website that is no1 in Google in my niche word and has been for years
- its an old html site and has an nicheword.com domain name

but your engine gives the first search result for "nicheword" - my Facebook
and Flickr accounts, then other companies websites, instead of my actual
website which is no1 on Google,

and my actual website is like in 10th place in your results which is pretty
bad compared to Google,

looking at the DDG search results , it seems like:

1) you put more emphasis on social networds than Google ,

2) and you seem to put less emphasis on the domain address ( nicheword.com )
than Google does ,

I wonder is that logic reasonable - in terms of relevancy of the results,

3) you seem to like wordpress and other well known platforms and dislike good
old .html websites ..

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epi0Bauqu
I don't have an easy straightforward answer for you. We focus on a few things
wrt to algo: 1) figuring out the best sources to deliver for instant
answers/0-click info; 2) removing useless sites; 3) trying to detect "context"
a bit from the query and make results match it as best we can, which also fits
into 1).

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napierzaza
I see, it's some sort of search engine.

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twinge
A majority of the search results are from Bing, blended with some other
sources (Wolfram, Wikipedia, others).

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colonelxc
From the FAQ:

<http://duckduckgo.com/faq.html>

 _Where do you get your results?

From over 30 sources, including DuckDuckBot (our own crawler), crowd-sourced
sites (in our own index), Yahoo! "BOSS", "embed.ly", "WolframAlpha",
"EntireWeb", "Bing" & "Blekko". For any given search, there is usually a
vertical search engine out there that does a better job at answering it than a
general search engine. Our long-term goal is to get you information from that
best source, ideally in instant answer form._

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citricsquid
contacts, contacts, contacts!

