
Duck Duck Go = Perfect search engine for programmers - fseek
http://fseek.me/2010/05/duck-duck-go-my-new-search-engine/
======
pavs
I like Duck Duck Go. Mostly because, there is someone out there who is
courageous enough to give it a go, single-handedly, into the search engine
market. So props to him, I can support someone like him.

Having said that. There can be too much of a good thing. I feel that HN is
being used as an advertising platform to promote DDG, which in itself is not
such a bad thing when there are major developments and exiting features and
news about it once in a while. So can we try to go easy on this promotional
bandwagon?

~~~
jacquesm
I'd rather see 10 more articles about DDG than one more about the ipad or
fakestevejobs.

~~~
timr
_"I'd rather see 10 more articles about DDG than one more about the ipad or
fakestevejobs."_

...because clearly, those are the only choices.

As long as we're throwing around false dichotomies, I'd rather see 10 more
articles about the internals of a search engine than one more rah-rah post
about DDG.

~~~
epi0Bauqu
What would you like to know? For starters:
[http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2009/03/duck-duck-go-
arc...](http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2009/03/duck-duck-go-
architecture.html)

~~~
ntoshev
Do you maintain full text indices for parts of the web and which parts, or
does it all fall back to external services like Wikipedia search, Yahoo BOSS,
etc?

If you have some indices on your servers, how do you build and search them? Is
it your own technology, or open source (Xapian, Lucene-based, etc)? In what
percent of searches do you display results from your own indices?

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epi0Bauqu
It's not perfect yet, but I'd really like to get there:
[http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/03/hack-hack-
go.htm...](http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/03/hack-hack-go.html)

Here's what's coming:

\--Stack Overflow, man pages & programming documentation in 0-click.

\--More programming !bangs; I've already added a bunch but would love more
suggestions: <http://duckduckgo.com/bang.html>

\--More goodies; I've added a lot recently (color codes, regexp, more advanced
math to wolfram alpha, today unicode); again, suggestions welcome:
<http://duckduckgo.com/goodies.html>

~~~
bouncingsoul
I use !bangs a lot, but I wish they worked at the end of your search terms
instead of just at the beginning.

I often don't think about the specifics of what I want until I've started
typing, then I realize, "Oh, I actually want the wikipedia page of this." So I
have to Ctrl-A to the beginning and type !w [space].

It's not a big hassle, but it'd be great if I could skip that step.

~~~
epi0Bauqu
Easy fix--will do tomorrow as it's getting late :)

~~~
epi0Bauqu
This is now fixed. I also made them case insensitive.

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plq
ddg is quite nice when you're searching in languages with a relatively simple
morphology. For English, I'm not using google any more unless ddg tells me to
do so :)

It is very easy to perform shallow parsing operations on English, because of
its relatively simple morphology. However, for agglutinative languages like
Turkish, (Finnish, Hungarian and Japanese are also in the same family) where
stems can appear under too many forms to enumerate, basic shallow parsing
algorithms would not produce as interesting search results.

My anecdotal experience with DDG in Turkish seems to go in line with that
assumption. So, I think DDG has a lot room for improvement in processing
languages with complex morphology.

==================

A famous illustrative Turkish word is:
uygarlaştıramadıklarımızdanmışsınızcasına

...which decomposes to suffixes as follows:
uygar+laş+tır+ama+dık+lar+ımız+dan+mış+sınız+casına

...and translates to english as follows: behaving as if you(plural) are among
those whom we could not cause to become civilized

------
silkodyssey
I am current taking the search engine for a spin and it has made a great first
impression. I particularly like that instead of paging the search results it
displays the results on demand using ajax. I prefer this interface because
with less effort I see more results. I've found that with Google I tend to not
to move past the first page and by doing that I probably miss out on
information that may have been useful to me.

I wonder if Google has ever considered a similar interface for their search
results.

~~~
jacquesm
Google will not do that because it would cost them a fortune in missed ad
impressions and clicks.

The big question is how Gabriel will scale DDG with the design decisions
already made.

It's quite possible that DDG can get to profitability with the layout the way
it is today, maybe not as profitable as google but I don't think that would
matter much.

Making a step back in income is a lot harder than foregoing a certain amount
of income from the start.

~~~
nkurz
_Google will not do that because it would cost them a fortune in missed ad
impressions and clicks._

This seems unnecessarily constraining. They already allow you change your
preferences to see 100 results per search instead of the default. How does
this fit with your logic?

Certainly Google is very concerned with click-through on ads, but I'm not sure
they'd be losing much if they allowed continuous scrolling. What percentage of
their revenue do you think they derive from ads placed on 'next' pages?

And certainly there would be some way that they could integrate more ads with
the Ajax loads: adding them to the sidebar as you scroll, or otherwise
integrating them with the incrementally added results.

~~~
jacquesm
> They already allow you change your preferences to see 100 results per search
> instead of the default. How does this fit with your logic?

That nobody except for a few geeks do it. Just like the 'I feel lucky' button.

> Certainly Google is very concerned with click-through on ads, but I'm not
> sure they'd be losing much if they allowed continuous scrolling. What
> percentage of their revenue do you think they derive from ads placed on
> 'next' pages?

About 32% according to their own statistics. 68% of the clicks (ads or
results) are on page 1, the rest on subsequent pages.

Google is working hard to get to the point where 100% of the clicks are done
on the first page, then it is a moot point, but a 32% impact to their bottom
line is not something they'll do if they don't have to.

Also, yes, they could load that ad again, but I suspect that may not be as
effective and would lead to a lot of complaints. A 'quiet' (as in non-
animated) page creates a lot of goodwill, switching ads would likely lead to a
distraction and therefore diminished user experience.

~~~
nkurz
Great statistics, thanks! That's much higher than I would have guessed. While
I agree that very few people change the default number of results, I would
have also guessed that few click through to a second page.

Personally, I don't like the AJAX update approach. I'd much rather that a site
just give me a long list of results, and allow me to scroll through them
without loading delays. If I could set Google to return 1000 results, it would
feel about right.

~~~
jacquesm
> I'd much rather that a site just give me a long list of results, and allow
> me to scroll through them without loading delays.

I think that is a balance between server load and user convenience.

On ddg it is already pretty fast, if you aren't in a real hurry it is hardly
noticeable and faster than clicking through to a second page.

~~~
JoachimSchipper
Well, that, and the fact that users _really_ hate pages that are slow to load.
(Although most of the loading would happen off-screen, this can still slow
down users/other requests/...)

------
cookiecaper
When I tried out DuckDuckGo about a year ago, I noticed it was really good for
general queries, but always had to go back to Google when I searched for
compiler error messages or other programming-related things. Because of this,
I eventually slipped back into full-time Googleage, despite giving DDG a try
for about a month and a half.

~~~
epi0Bauqu
A lot has changed in a year. I'd love if you'd try it again and email me your
detailed feedback, so in another year maybe you'll switch :)

~~~
Pistos2
(To grandparent comment[er]) I also had a similar experience a while ago; but
I gave DDG a second change recently, and indeed, the results have improved
enough for me to keep DDG as my primary search engine, resorting to Google
only once every 50 searches or so.

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techiferous
Perfect for programmers? I was skeptical. Then I searched for A* (which
doesn't work on Google). Perfect indeed!

~~~
zackattack
Nice. I will switch when it handles mathematical expressions well.

~~~
epi0Bauqu
What kind? It might already or might be an easy fix.

~~~
y0ghur7_xxx
personally I often use google to do stuff like

<http://duckduckgo.com/?q=120mph+in+km%2Fh>

or

<http://duckduckgo.com/?q=1%24+in+€>

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BoppreH
When I first heard about DDG it was because of it's privacy. I couldn't care
less for that.

Now, saying that it is good for _programming_ questions made me set it as the
default search engine without even testing.

Zero-click info is amazing for quick doc checks, the auto-extending page is
sweet and actually displaying the page link and favicon is a lot more
informative.

Two things though:

\- It's slow. Maybe because I'm in South America, or the server is not that
good, but speed is essential for a search engine.

\- Special characters are not always handled correctly. A* work perfectly, but
the situation is inverted when it comes to "@". Google's results for @override
(<http://www.google.com/search?q=@override>) are better than DDG's
(<http://duckduckgo.com/?q=@override>).

~~~
epi0Bauqu
Thx. Servers are currently in the US; hence, the slowness for some people
outside of the US. Eventually I hope to improve the infrastructure there.

Special character handling will be much better as I index programming
documentation and Stack Overflow with the special characters.

------
MikeCapone
I like DDG, but the last time I used it I had to fall back to Google to find
an answer to my question. I was trying to find the date at which the central
bank of Canada was going to make its next rate announcement. I knew it was
June, used the most obvious keywords, but didn't find a good answer with DDG.
With Google it was in the top 10.

Not a huge problem. It works most times when I use it. But it's not quite
Google yet.

------
adrianwaj
Is DDG completely independent or does it pull in results from other search
engines, like a meta search engine? Does it do its own spidering?

~~~
ErrantX
Both. Gabriel has disussed this before (I'm on my iPhone so no links sorry).
But basically he does his own spodering and also uses yahoo boss and the bing
api.

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ecaradec
As a win32 programmer, I always try things like createwindowex and I expect to
get msdn as it is the most informative page. I can get it on DDG (doesn't
even, show up ). It's the first result on google, even if I mistype it like
createwindowe or createwindoaexaze. But may be I'm a dinosaur.

~~~
epi0Bauqu
The first result at <http://duckduckgo.com/?q=createwindowex> is not what you
want? It goes to <http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-
us/library/ms632680(VS.85).aspx>

------
bcl
And FYI in Chrome you can set it to use DDG for search instead of Google (they
actually have quite a number of choices).

------
steve19
"Privacy -Your searches are private! I don’t need to say more"

Well ... they are now

