
Ask YC: What do you think of my new search engine? - epi0Bauqu
http://duckduckgo.com/
======
walesmd
Pretty impressive results for the terms I searched for. Unfortunately, the
design made me temporarily go blind.

In all seriousness, the name is pretty horrible and I "feel" as if I am using
a website, not a tool. Google feels like a tool - I get in an out quickly, it
doesn't invade my flow. Your application (and others, like Mahalo) are so
visually invasive I would never use them, no matter the results that we
returned.

Not really a design thing - although it stems from the design - more like a
workflow thing... I dunno, hard to describe.

~~~
epi0Bauqu
Thanks for the feedback. I would very much like it to be a "tool" as you
describe. I've gone through many design iterations, and have tried to keep the
"clutter" down to a minimum.

I would be interested to know what specific design elements you think are
contributing to this problem. I know you said it isn't really a design
problem, but there has to be more to say about it :) Colors? The results on
the right?

~~~
calambrac
For me, the highlight-and-underline-on-hover effect is very distracting. It
would be nice if the search entry field had a stronger visual separation from
the search results. There also needs to be a stronger visual separation
between each search result. This might just be that I'm so heavily conditioned
by Google, but I'm thrown off by the results being so far from the left edge
of the screen. Also, the red, it's a little harsh, and the font size, it's a
little big.

Otherwise, though, just playing around, this seems like a really nice search
engine, the results seem great. If I didn't think it had a lot of promise, I
wouldn't have posted a critique.

~~~
asmosoinio
Regarding the "highlight-and-underline-on-hover effect", I liked that. It is
really nice that the whole text area works as a link, clicking on a hit is
easier. And the highlight, well, highlights that.

Works for me.

~~~
netcan
Works for me too. But I would use a softer highlight.

------
trominos
Your engine actually seems superior to Google in some ways, which is
fantastic. I've always wondered if a single person could do something
technologically novel in search; you seem to have done so. I wouldn't be
surprised if your engine opens the doors to real, widespread innovation in
search.

Your UI isn't great, though. Some unordered points:

• Your name is bad.

• Your text is too big.

• The whole thing feels too unprofessional.

• You need to show more search results by default. Four results feels
claustrophobic. People won't get overwhelmed, they've been living with long
results lists for ten years.

• You need to make the traditional ordered list of results distinct from the
other pieces of information that your search engine thinks are relevant. Right
now it can be hard to distinguish results from extras, and I think that will
be an impediment to getting users (if getting users is in fact your goal). In
particular, don't put the topic-filtering questions above the results — put
them to the side.

• Don't highlight the result that I'm mousing over.

• Get rid of the little arrows next to links.

Actually, I'd suggest going to Google, writing down every difference between
their UI and yours, and asking yourself why you did it differently. I don't
think the Google UI is necessarily the ultimate way to present search results,
but I don't think you've added much, either, and theirs is pretty damn good.

Technology: right now your search engine doesn't seem to understand that
recent events are more important, typically, than past ones; a search for
"explanation of the economic crisis" didn't produce anything in the top four
results (although the fifth one, ironically, was relevant). Google gave me
what I was looking for (although it's notable that if I _hadn't_ been looking
for stuff about the current crisis, your engine would have been better).

~~~
JulianMorrison
The name is good. Memorable.

The text is exactly right for a different way of looking at search results -
like a little generated topical page rather than like a list of links.

Unprofessional is good! Professional = boring. Altavista was "professional".

Four _good_ results is enough.

You aren't getting the whole "looks like a topical page" thing. The mixed
sources of results are evidently nondistinct for a reason!

Yeah, the highlight is annoying. Breaks the unified flow.

Arrows are hints evidently copied from Wikipedia. It goes with the design and
it's a visual hint they link off-site. Makes sense to me! Moreover, it made
such immediate visual sense i didn't even see them as distinct elements until
you described them.

------
nostrademons
I'm actually pretty impressed. Searched for "Epigram" first and it came up
with the programming language as the first result, along with Conor's
homepage. Searched for "Arya Stark" and it came up with the Westeros fan wiki
and Wikipedia entry. Searched for Hacker News, and the site was the first hit.
Searched for my name (a tough one, since lots of people share it), and came up
with my FriendFeed page, Write Yourself a Scheme in 48 Hours, and a support
question I left on the webfaction forum.

Couple comments:

What's with the Wink and PeopleFinder links? Partnerships? They're almost
never what I want, and putting them up top is distracting.

The AJAX-load-more-results-on-scroll feature is cool, but I found it a little
jerky and distracting. This could be because just hold down the down arrow, so
I go _really_ fast and often hit the end of the page while it's loading. Any
way to make the transition a little smoother, maybe by preloading results and
only displaying them as you scroll, maybe by a fade or slide transition?

------
ambulatorybird
The name consists of three stressed syllables, which is hard to say fluidly.
You can't turn it into a verb, like "google". This may cause problems with
marketability. I am being totally serious.

~~~
mishmax
"just duck duck it" sounds marketable to me. similar to "just google it"

~~~
pygy
Indeed. The "Go" may be the oddball...

------
mynameishere
I really need to see the URLs for hits.

~~~
PieSquared
So _that's_ what was missing! I knew something was disrupting my normal flow
of analyzing search results... and now that you mention it I realize I usually
look at the URL's, sometimes even before the article title.

~~~
iamdave
If you click "more links" below the first few main links you'll see search
results with URLS

------
geuis
@epi0Bauqu I really like it. I'm most impressed with the result set. You
aren't giving me annoying messages like "1 billion matches found", just a
handful that are pretty accurate. At first glance, most people will say off-
the-cuff that this is bad, you're limiting the results. However, a user
doesn't need millions of results. Just the ones that work.

It definitely passed my vanity test. I searched on several things I associate
with myself and the results were all accurate. Definitely some things left
out, but everything shown was good.

Some of the comments others have made about the visual design are half-
correct. The helvetica font hurts readability. I'm on a Mac and Windows XP
machines side-by-side and its almost blurry. You can't beat Verdana or Arial
for readability. The color scheme is a little odd, mainly for the logo. If you
get successful, invest in having a logo professionally designed, but that
shouldn't be a focus now.

Keep the ajaxy stuff. Loved it. The "More Topics" bit is perfect.I don't have
to click through page after page of pagination to scroll results like on
Google. You show me a small set of relevant matches, then if I want more I
just click that and there's some more. Very easy to use.

Overall I think you're off to a great start.

------
daremon
I was very impressed with the results I got for some queries. The images were
spot on. The first results were indeed official sites. I liked the fact that I
see web results, images, news in one page.

Cons (sorry!): 1\. I disliked the name 2\. The design was bad. Huge textbox,
ugly duck, everything seems scattered around 3\. I think I liked the ajaxy
interface and the more links, however I would have liked more results in every
category (images, news etc) before I had to press "more"

Overall excellent work.

------
epi0Bauqu
Hi all, I would really appreciate any feedback. Here is some more info:
<http://duckduckgo.com/about.html>

~~~
trevelyan
Good job. You're finding quality stuff in the field I care about, and ignoring
some irrelevant junk. Keep it up!

------
axod
Impressed so far, but not impressed with the [load more results]->web2.0
spinner I'd rather just have normal pagination there.

Seems to give some good results back in a useful way.

~~~
arockwell
I agree, pagination would be much better because then I wouldn't have to
scroll to see all of the new results.

~~~
agbell
I like the ajax loading. Internet marketing types will like the ability to see
the first X pages all on one page without having to set some parameter (as in
google)

~~~
tobyo
Yes, the ajax loading is much less intrusive than loading a new page. It makes
it far easier to search through the existing results. It needs one or two UI
changes:

1) When you click 'more results' add a divider before the first new result to
make it clear which new results just appeared. In most cases the first new
link will already be highlighted since the mouse will be hovering overy it but
any antsy mouser will not have this benefit.

Also, I notice that I have the tendency (and need) to move the mouse off the
first new link so I can read it. This is very inefficient so it would best to
append the new results one line below the 'more links' link.

2) Consider adding an auto-scroll to put the first new result at the top or
middle of the page to reduce scrolling. This may be disruptive, however.

------
notauser
Wow, I really like the results, especially the 'see also' section.

(Give a search for "pearl" a go for a good example.)

More focused searches also worked well ("javascript array split" got me the
result I wanted).

I also liked the fall back to google domain specific search for "javascript
aray split w3schools" although I'm not sure I understand exactly what made it
do that.

The result layout needs some work, mostly to make long results easier to scan,
but I will probably carry on using this provided I can remember the URL.

------
mstefff
Looks like one of those fake copycat google co-op search engines you see
spammed all over ebay for sale at first.

pretty interesting functionality - i like how vague searches ask for
categorization. i searched a band name and got specific info and links.

but most searches produce way too little broad results.

interesting but needs more work i'd say.

~~~
dcminter
Ack. Good results but not yet so impressive that it's a Google killer. I gave
it a quick spin and it gave better results than most prospective giant
killers, but still not notably better than the giant itself.

Unlike most, I'd be prepared to give it another go at some future date though
- so this definitely has some potential. I hope the developer keeps on working
on this.

------
jgilliam
I'm guessing you are using wikipedia to vet the query and determine the type
of things to display, and then have some mappings from that into other data
sets.

I'm sure there's more to it than that, but very clever.

The fact that everyone is commenting on the design is a good sign, that stuff
is easy to change.

------
prakash
What motivated you to create this search engine? Google/other search engines
did not come up with _relevant_ results?

~~~
epi0Bauqu
Quite simply, I looked at the current state of search and saw a path through
which I could add something useful to the space.

There are all sorts of issues with current search, most of which have been
discussed on this forum elsewhere. Relevancy is certainly one of them, but
there are others too, e.g. spam, clutter, discovery, and UI.

~~~
siong1987
I did something similar with Yahoo! BOSS APIs but I used terminal-liked
console as the UI. Sometimes, I really think that it will be more useful for
hackers to use a Terminal-liked search engine - <http://geeky.siong1987.com>.
It is a bit slow because the whole application is not well-architectured. I
sacrificed too much speed power for the developer feature.

About your application, I think the name of the search engine is really
awkward. And, the logo is really too colorful. It seems like a side-project
more than a serious project. Anyway, it displayed the results that I expected.

~~~
huhtenberg
Reminds me of Google's command line interface - <http://goosh.org>

------
jstabbac
It's annoying. My train of thought when I got there: _Good, clean simple
interface. Funny name._ This text box is huge. I don't know if that's good or
bad _Everythings scrunched up at the top. I have plenty of vertical room, use
it._ I'll search for something... alright why is there a loading bar for a
search engine? _This is frusturating having to wait for my results_ What? Only
4? _This 'load more results' thing is fairly annoying, just load them for me_
I'll try something else... say 'blue wallpaper' *Oh how handy, I'm at Google
now.

------
tdavis
Impressive. I "Ducked" one of my new favorite musicians and found a band he
was in that I'd never heard of. Top entry was a Wikipedia blurb. I like it.

------
kleneway
This is epic. Nice job.

Name suggestion - start the name with "go", something like "GoDuckDuck" or
"GoodSearch" or something much better than that. That way, as people start
typing "google", your site shows up in the autocomplete list in the browser
and would remind people about your site at the moment they are looking to
search for something.

------
visitor4rmindia
Kudos to you - I think you've done a fantastic job.

Plus it takes balls to venture into a space that's dominated by the mighty
Google :-)

FEEDBACK:

* The name sucks - especially the "go" at the end. "Duck duck" I can live with. "Duck duck go" somehow doesn't feel right.

* Fonts/Colors etc - I really wouldn't worry about it. People get used to almost anything once they get good enough results. The hue and cry at reddit when the new version came out is proof enough of that. A few months on everyone has forgotten completely what the old version looked like and it hasn't hurt them any.

Heck, when Google came out their interface wasn't anything to sing and dance
about. But now everyone thinks it the bee's knees and the cat's whiskers :-D.
Just get good results and worry about the font/logo/colors some other day.

* For a few searches, the results were impressive and I liked the flow (I searched for "Haskell" and "Dragonfly" (the movie) plus my name etc).

I was really getting into it when my search for "Indian Recipes" returned
recipes from Karnataka. The "more links" didn't seem to return very good
results either. I had to go back to Google (which returned really good
results).

* URL's of results - This is another big one. The way the URL's are currently returned is really bad - it looks like part of the text and is difficult to quickly scan for. It's really important for most users to be able to quickly scan the urls of the results. In your current interface we have to depend on the title, which is not half as useful.

Overall - it's a great job! I'm VERY impressed.

All the best!

------
Bluem00
Searched for: "best techno music". I was ready for more results on the initial
page and tried to scroll down to them. All I got to see was a screen of
whitespace. I don't think it would hurt to increase the number of results that
you show. Also, I didn't bother to hit the more links button; I guess I've
been trained by existing search engines not to do that, and I expect that
other people are the same.

------
Niten
Wow, the quality of your search results is really impressive -- I went in
expecting another Cuil, but now I intend to give it a spin as my default
engine in Firefox.

I was wondering... to the extent that Duck Duck Go takes its cues from "human
powered" sites e.g. Wikipedia, are you using a pre-defined list of reliable
user-generated sites out there, or is your search engine somehow identifying
these algorithmically?

------
goldsmith
The organization by relevance is interesting, but through some test searches I
did, the more obscure the search, the less this helps. Basically, for
something with a Wikipedia/Facebook/Myspace/official site it looks nice.
However, for something less known or employing more vague terms, the results
page look like I mistyped a url and ended up on a page parked for
typosquatting.

------
ComputerGuru
Bug: When searching for articles that redirect to a different article on
Wikipedia, the results for the redirected article are displayed.

My search: "NeoSmart Technologies" On Wikipedia this redirects to our main
product, "EasyBCD," which is what DuckDuck returned...

But really, really nice ideas going on there, it's very information-centric
verses link-centric, sort of like a powerset that works.

------
BlueZeniX
I searched for poop (didnt have anything meaningful to look for), and got:
Aspect-oriented programming, "Post Object-Oriented Programming"

made me laugh.

------
nuclear_eclipse
I like the fact that results are returned by relevance and categorization.
However, the lack of visual cues between categories is rather harsh to follow.
I think if you were to have a sightly grey background for each category with
whitespace between, things would be much easier to look at and comprehend.
Otherwise, the results were, for the most part, great.

------
knarf
I think you should state more explicitly that results are gouped and contain
links to specialiced searches. When I searched for Python i.e. I had no idea
that clicking on "Python (genus), a group of snakes" would generate more
results - I thought it would bring me directly to wikipedia.

Now that I know it I see that you ask me to choose a topic, but I totally
didn't see it the first time. Perhaps you could do s.th to the topic links to
make it more clear for first time users that they bring you so to a search for
that topic.

some other thoughts:

-Yes the font is too big first, but after using it a bit I actually like it..

-Yes the name is awful first but "duck duck it" is great and I just added it to my firefox searches :)

Congratulations! You took a freakin duck and did the unimaginable and beat
google with it!

------
dmoney
I agree with what several others have said: I don't like the huge text in the
search box, and I need to see more results on a page.

Search results were relevant when I tried "how to make a damascus blade". When
I tried to find a story I've been looking for (that I haven't been able to
find in other search engines either), I wasn't successful, although I didn't
try for very long. Things I'd like to be able to search for: it was linked to
from a forum but was not, itself on a forum; near the beginning the main
character was hit by a truck; he woke up and found that his life had been a
simulation.

So if your search engine would let me find that, I'd be sold. As a general
purpose search engine, it looks promising but I'll stick to Google for now.

------
bigthboy
I like the concept of it but the layout of the results page is...well... not
so good. I, like others, was impressed by the results I got for my search, but
it was hard to tell what I was looking at for a minute. I didn't instantly
know that what I was looking at was in a certain category and so on and so
forth. It looked more like a bunch of random text about X topic thrown up on
the page in an unstructured manner with hyperlinks to who knows where. I think
with a little bit of work on structuring the results that it will be a pretty
decent system. Not that I see it rocking the foundation of Google anytime
soon, but that doesn't mean Microsoft ;-) they are only 6% after all.

------
AlexRodriguez
That's quacktastic.

~~~
shafqat
You are funny.

------
schtog
I tried some stuff and the results were good.

Is this a serious attempt to beat google? Do you index the whole web? What
technique do you use?

Or is it a proof of concept for some idea of how to improve search?

Do you have funding?

Have you built it from scratch or are you building on top of other stuff?

------
shafqat
Simply amazing. Really. This is so much better than Cuil or a lot of the other
BS search engines out there.

The presentation isn't great. So with some improvements in the design and a
marketing machine, this could be big.

------
raju
Pretty impressive. I did a few searches (including my name, and the name of a
person I knew about a decade ago, Ruby etc) and am definitely impressed with
the resultset.

I do agree with the others that the UI could be done a little better,
including the colors (a little too vibrant for me) and the name. I don't
really care about the home page, since I dont remember the last time I went to
Google's homepage.

Once I like a search engine that consistently gives me good results, using
FF's Keyword search is the way to go.

All in all, great work, and I certainly wish you luck.

------
natch
Not bad at all. I guess you're scraping Wikipedia for a lot of the
disambiguation descriptions.

The hits in a disambiguated topic after the first page need some work. Many in
the wrong topics. But still, not bad for a beginning.

I suggest duckduck.com instead of duckduckgo.com.

The flashy logo page might be the _only_ reason some people use it. They'll
like the fact that they can show off that they have found a different tool.
But that's just a small set of certain types of people. Me, I'd prefer a
simple tool that takes up less space and is less flashy.

------
rubentopo
Cool (i like the fact that when i searched for duckduckgo the first result was
"awesome search engine"). I also searched for google (and it gave me cool
results such as it's use as a verb). It worked for technical questions such as
NullPointerException and sigsegv so overall it's very cool.Congrats! [Perhaps
building an add-on for word and office suites would be great for this type of
search engine, i would like it(because of things like what i got out of the
_google_ query]

------
brianmckenzie
You score major points with me just for having a duck in the logo.

Also, my search results were quite relevant. I'd reduce the font size a bit,
and maybe lose the styling on the search button.

Good for a first try.

------
rohan_lindo
Pretty impressive search results.I think you should change work more on the
domain name and user interface.I think it can be a very useful tool for
finding relevant information.

------
mattmcknight
My random query for "tears of a clown" worked well. How tied is this to the
internet? There might be a market in the Enterprise search world if you are
managing the index.

------
hhm
I liked it, I think it has very impressive functionality; I think you won't
have a problem selling it to some company. The search market is huge and
doesn't end at Google.

------
ashleyw
Ummm...at first I thought it was a front using something like Yahoo! BOSS as a
back end - until I saw you had a bot.

Would love to know more, like if you do crawl everything yourself... :)

------
SapphireSun
Very nice! I like your search results and the image display. However, like
other posters here, I think that the text is a bit big and the name could use
some work. The one thing I think that you're missing in the UI is some
familiarity to ground new users - and most importantly a link to see more
links that consistently appears on the first screen without needing to scroll.
URLs appearing on all links would be better as well.

Just my 2 cents. Keep up the great work!

------
s3graham
Nice start. It looks like a mobile phone interface to me, blown up to desktop
size. Maybe a phone-centric focus would be a useful direction?

------
lisp_padawan
very impressed, tried a variety of search terms and got not only what I was
expecting but also other hits that were keyword equivalent. ok fair enough
it's a little less responsive than google ;o) but I'm guessing you don't have
a spare $50 billion to play with! (jk - the speed is fine btw). The thing that
needs most attention (imho) is the design, whilst there are good things (the
layout of the search results, especially of 'wide' keywords like 'ruby' or
'augustus') I'm less of a fan of the use of red - in design terms red is an
emotive, passionate colour, I would recommend perhaps a blue which usually
represents safety, security and trust (look at bank colour schemes). You might
alos consider green or grey. The red sets me on edge. Love the use of larger
fonts sizes, excellent - should be popular with the age > 25 crowd.

All in all very impressed, I wish you the very best of luck and have
bookmarked and will continue to use. (Remember to keep Hacker News updated
with any new developments!).

------
gscott
I know some people like the duck name. I have the domain "askShare.com" that
might work better for you. The top part, ask could be the search input and
make a bottom part for share, then have a scrolling list of things people are
sharing (feeds, etc). I noticed you have a couple of applications based upon
sharing (photos, groups) so you are into sharing.

------
dangoldin
I like it. Sure the design can use some work but the results are pretty
impressive and it's quick. I would follow some of the suggestions to not use
AJAX for the loading since it's a bit unintuitive. I would also post the URL
to the found result.

I'm also a big fan of commands on the line: "define word" should define it,
and so forth. That can potentially be a next step.

------
skolos
I really like the results. I'd like to invest :)

------
abl
awesome work! would you mind telling us how it works? :)

I got decent results, but for a small number of search terms:

When I searched for: "com surrogate encountered a problem" I got decent
results, but when I searched for "com surrogate encountered a problem norton
ghost" the results were off completely.

I then tried the second search query with google and got precise results.

------
peterhi
Good results, could probably do with a few more results per page. You're doing
tons better than cuil :) but so far there is nothing that Google does not
already do. Which is, I suppose, the point. Why use your search engine and not
Google?

We switched to Google from Yahoo, Alta Vista and the rest because Google was
better. What do you have?

------
colinplamondon
Highly relevant results for the band I entered, but not enough to make me want
to switch from Google.

It's not that you aren't good, it's just that you aren't _great_ \- there's
nothing here that would make me want to purposefully break a habit formed over
the past seven odd years. Namely, using Google.

~~~
nostrademons
I wonder if search has become a commodity, and the reason why Google dominates
isn't because of its search engine, it's because of its brand name. Search
actually seems a lot like the food industry in that you can't really judge the
quality of the product beyond a certain level, yet you care deeply about that
quality. Those industries usually tend to become branding plays, not
technology plays.

~~~
Jasber
Google's brand does influence its search results. I recall the MSN Live team
put the Google logo above their results and people automatically perceived
them as more relevant even though the results had not changed.

After much Googling the closest I could come to finding the article was here
(at the bottom): <http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/3601751>

------
zaatar
Very impressive with the relevancy of the results!

Here's one not-so-nice search, however:

<http://duckduckgo.com/?q=jace>

See other searches to get an idea of what you're missing:

<http://www.google.com/search?q=jace>

------
workpost
Not bad actually, if you're not just scraping results from other engines (or
even if you are), you should keep working on this. When I did searches, I
actually found links I was looking for in the first few results. Name is
strange but it could grow on me.

duck duck go it!

------
mattmaroon
Shouldnt it be Duck Duck Goose?

------
abless
I like it, but if I think for the reasons why I like it, it is probably
because this site looks more like an encyclopedia than an actual search
engine. It basically brings up the summary of the respective wiki page.

------
Flemlord
Very nice--fewer links, but they were all of extremely high quality.
Suggestion: Throw this up on 99designs and get some better graphics. The
current ones seem amateurish, and not in that good Google kinda way.

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Jem
A vanity search turns up nothing, therefore my ego won't let me use your
search engine. ;)

In all seriousness, I like the way you're going, but I didn't like the way the
results are laid out - it just looked sloppy to me.

~~~
songism
I definitely agree that the results should be more structured. Also the page
should be aligned left because that's what people are used to. Maybe something
like this: <http://pixtures.s3.amazonaws.com/duck.jpg>

The search button is way too big. The text is too big. Shrink everything and
fit more information on one page.

Maybe include some "Web links" on every page. Then right align the "More
topics" and "More Web links" to the right so people know they're not ordinary
links, but instead offer additional functionality.

Overall, I really like it. It looks like you lift a lot of information and
links from wikipedia. I think this is a great idea.

------
cousin_it
Works great! It's very impressive that a startup can make a search engine.

~~~
daremon
The really impressive thing is that this is the work of a _1 person_ startup

------
fuzzythinker
I like how it breaks down into categories, eg. 'django' gives the person, web
(py framework), etc, but don't like the large fonts, need to scroll down quite
a bit to see all results.

------
greyman
Good work! Impressive results and good speed. Congrates...

I don't like the name that much. Your project is promising, I suggest to
invest into better name while you are not that well know.

Anyway, you are great.

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sigstoat
you're not catastrophically bad or slow, unlike some others that have shown up
lately. good work on avoiding negative points right off the bat.

if the first page doesn't have what i want, i find myself confused as to what
my next course of action should be.

my first reaction to all the ajax stuff is "hey, thats kind of cool" my second
reaction is "my expections about what should happen when i move my mouse
(mostly nothing) are being violated! help!"

in summary: i think you need to do some real usability studies.

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dmnd
Your logo and red and yellow colour scheme make me think of fast food.

You should add Javascript to make my browser display the URL in the status bar
when my mouse hovers over a result.

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khangtoh
Ok for some reason this search is not returning the appropriate results

<http://duckduckgo.com/?q=duck+duck+go>

Good Job anyways!

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dustineichler
Whoa, I really liked the search results. The name on the other hand could use
some work. I think it kinda undermines the good work you obviously did.

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yangyang42
for me, it was enticing enough to give it a try.

okay, Here's the first thing I tried, because I was actually looking for it:

try to search for: "mashable wordpress theme" ... FAIL! you took me to search
the mashable site for "wordpress theme" tags, which returned nothing.

however, when I searched "wordpress theme" ... SUCCESS, kinda. What I was
looking for displayed on the right, in recent news.

It's okay. I think something definitely needs to be improved here.

Hope that helps.

Good luck.

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schtog
I actually used it a few times when Google didn't deliver and ddg delivered
better even if not pefect, impressive.

But I am not a fan of the design or the name.

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immad
Why "Try duck duck Google".

I found that confusing. Just say Google. Also you could use Yahoo BOSS to pull
in results when you dont have any (if thats allowed)

~~~
epi0Bauqu
I am using Yahoo BOSS as fallback. That message comes up when Yahoo BOSS times
out (i.e. double fallback), which unfortunately happens more than it should.

Duck Duck Google is a remnant of earlier functionality that is currently not
live. You're right, Google' is simpler than 'Duck Duck Google'.

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mingyeow
can you define use cases more clearly? I think the problem with up and coming
search engines is that they are always generic, coming up hard against google,
which works well for 80% of the cases (simple search), but sucks for 20% (when
you do not really know what you are looking for).

do email me at mingyeow@gmail.com if you are interested in more thoughts on
how use cases can be more clear!

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rksprst
I LOVE the keyboard shortcuts. In fact, just because of that (and good
results) I might switch to using this as my default search engine.

~~~
AndyKelley
If you're using firefox, every website has keyboard shortcuts. Just press '
(quote) and start typing a unique word from a link you see. When the link you
want is selected, press enter.

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jcdreads
In addition to working well and presenting results well, the _name_ is
_inspired!_ Please don't let anyone here convince you otherwise.

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erik
It produced pretty nice results for "linux" but was less impressive when I
wanted to learn about the "hmmmv" acronym.

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0_o
Incredibly effective and accurate, i can not believe it is all done by one
person. It even understands chinese.

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kajecounterhack
Wow this is great..its the only search engine that actually returns my website
when I type in my name (sam liu)

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sosha
Wonderful, Just wonderful.

On the other hand, Im having the same thoughts as trominos(Scroll down). See
what he said about it.

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alien
aren't these google results spit out here (for obscure searches)..

I don't see any attribution..? (e.g. 'swarmware')

at <http://www.seekng.com> (and my others) I allow explicit selection, and
model the SearchProvider (connecting to search results memes in a graph)

~~~
alien
I see, Yahoo, not google (per links)

I'm just curious myself about the legalities

------
jgfoot
It is very useful for research-type queries. I like it better than hakia.
Thanks very much for this.

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redorb
pretty cool, seems to use wikipedia to seem semantic... which works most of
the time. I just don't see how its possible to break into google's market
share or for that sake, Yahoo's or MSN's ...

\- I think companies like octopart, that are doing segmented search have a
better chance.

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tlrobinson
Pretty good results, but some of them seem to be at least a few weeks out of
date.

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jcapote
Pretty good results; I love the minimal interface (although it is a bit
childish

------
andreyf
Pre-load your images - it's weird how the layout changes as they load.

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vikram
Duck Duck Go to cuill, is like Usane Bolt to me over a 100mts.

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dhimes
Don't forget the very useful "search within results" function.

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blader
Uhm, wow holy shit. The results feel better than Google.

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Fuca
You will need a better design and a hell of PR

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ynd
Congratulations.

The hits are dead on for obscure subjects.

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huherto
I liked, pretty impressive. Good Luck!

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andreyf
Keyboard shortcuts would help a lot.

~~~
epi0Bauqu
There are keyboard shortcuts!

~~~
andreyf
Oooh, thank you! Making them more obvious (an arrow like GMail seems to be the
standard now) would have helped, but maybe I'm just stupid :)

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TrevorJ
Props for putting this together.

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jamongkad
I love the name it's so cute!

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known
Looks good. Keep it up.

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anshul
This looks like BOSS.

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tok9
Slow, but seems way ahead than other sites claiming to "google killers".

Nice work

------
monkkbfr
Nice.

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bigbang
better than cuil. really

------
justin
well its no cuil...

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Allocator2008
Are you scraping wikipedia as a "top priority" node set in your search
algorithm? Actually not a bad idea. I typed "Alyssa Milano" in there, since I
am a HUGE 'Charmed' fan - anyway - that returned me a wiki article, as well as
images, and facebook links, basically everything I really would need to know
if I were writing a paper on her, including publicity images and so forth, all
right there in one result page.Maybe it is just me, but I thought the colour
scheme was kind of fun - different anyway - something for a change - I can
definitely see people using this at least as a supplement to google! Good
work! :-)

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ajkirwin
I search for something and get a wikipedia page, a website for a book and the
FDA's website above the results which actually interest me. Infact, they are
in a larger font than the rest.

Are these sponsored links or something? I'm not sure I dig it.

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volida
it redirects me to pricegrabber? a serious general search engine would never
do that! you lost me...

