7 ms·

DuckDuckGo Cooks Google's Goose

51 points by bastardsage 14y ago

andywhite37 14y ago
Am I the only one that struggles with the name "DuckDuckGo?" The unprofessional name makes it really hard for me to want to use the service, even if it has nice targeted results that may be more relevant or higher quality than Google's. Maybe "unprofessional" is not the right adjective, but I can't find the right one. I have the same problem with "Bing" - the logo is just such an eyesore, and the marketing is so obnoxious ("Decision Engine?").
- EternalFury 14y ago
  Relevant search results is all I care about when I use a search engine. (Oh, and I don't see how "Google" sounds professional.)
  - andywhite37 14y ago
    I agree that the content is what matters, but I just feel like it's a crying shame that a service like DuckDuckGo will never be taken seriously because of its name.
    - adventureful 14y ago
      Same problem Mamma.com and Dogpile have (not comparing search quality).
- nsmartt 14y ago
  You aren't. I've seen the debate a few times on HN, and I've had it with friends who also opt to use DuckDuckGo. It's "a bad name." It isn't evocative, it can't be (easily) made into a verb, and it lacks brevity. I don't really like the name, but I'm oddly comforted that I can shorten it to ddg (and use http://ddg.gg http://ddg.gg). I can deal for now, but I do think it should change.
- blantonl 14y ago
  Am I the only one that struggles with the name "DuckDuckGo?" You know, there is a company called "Yahoo!" which did OK for a while.
- GlennS 14y ago
  It would certainly prevent me from recommending it to friends. Just too embarrassing.
- cdmoyer 14y ago
  I think the name is the only reason I remembered it long enough after hearing about it to try it and eventually switch. I have had no issues recommending it.
  - andywhite37 14y ago
    That's a good point, the name is definitely memorable.
jebblue 14y ago
It looks like a cheap knock-off of Google and doesn't give me the hit count for "Ubuntu" (or I missed it). Google gives me over 200 million, Bing over 44 million.
- thematt 14y ago
  How is that in any way a useful statistic? Who cares about 200+ million results vs. 44 million? Most people don't look at the fifth result, let alone the 200 millionth one. What matters is the first page and whether those top results are the best and most relevant for a given query.
  - jebblue 14y ago
    It's useful to me, I've looked at it for over a decade, I want to get a good feeling that my search engine is doing everything it can to scour the Internet and is not filtering my search results out, they prioritize and that's cool.
- runako 14y ago
  >> Google gives me over 200 million, Bing over 44 million. Is that relevant to your evaluation of a search engine? I don't care how many hits the engine shows, just what it shows in the first 3 links or so. The rest is noise.
  - jebblue 14y ago
    You bet, you can't plan a trip to the farthest reaches of the Universe on only a few data points.
- wahnfrieden 14y ago
  Just so you know, at least Google's hit count is usually off by several orders of magnitude. It's comforting to see it, but it's almost entirely inaccurate.
  - jebblue 14y ago
adgar 14y ago
I've never seen someone describe a middleman so enthusiastically. Not that there isn't enormous added value in presentation or that duckduckgo has a poor offering at all - but your search result quality will always be limited to that of your partner-competitors' (Bing index in this case). And the more you succeed, the more expensive your partnership grows: see Netflix. Wait a minute. I just remembered the other added value: privacy. Now that I think about it, I know a few middlemen/middlewomen that I'd describe enthusiastically myself!
- duckduckgouser 14y ago
  I think middleman is a bit harsh. DuckDuckGo is providing a service. It isn't something that someone else can easily do themselves.
  - tferris 14y ago
    Which service? Taking the Bing API, building a frontend, a parser for few shortcuts and get some VCs to blog about me? Sounds like a project from a 48h hackathon.
    - boyter 14y ago
      It does, but Gabriel (the guy behind it) described the issue with that approach quite well here, http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/11/code-icebergs.html http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/11/code-icebergs.ht... Keep in mind quite a few people have done this before, bitcircle, 4hoursearch etc... spring to mind but DDG has actually done some innovations in the space and is still around. The fact that people know it will still be around next year encourages you to at least play with it.
einhverfr 14y ago
The question I have is as to their business model. There's a saying--- if you aren't buying a product, you are the product. So they have one paid link per page. Is that enough to make them profitable eventually?
- thematt 14y ago
  I don't see why not. Their costs are probably minimal (some servers + salaries). Beyond that they're just leveraging all the work of Bing and others. Also, they've taken barely any VC money, so it's not like there's a huge return expected in the first place.
adventureful 14y ago
Nice to see DuckDuckGo get more media exposure, however that article was disappointingly short and lite. Seemed to cut off abruptly.
suking 14y ago
I'm so sick of these DDG stories. The truth is no one uses them, 99.9999% of people outside SV have never heard of them and currently there is no reason to switch to them.
- glesica 14y ago
  I switched. For 80-90% of my queries it gets me to the same place as Google just as quickly, or more quickly in some cases. For the other 10-20% there's the !bang syntax, which also lets me search images and maps right from the Chrome address bar without ever hitting the mouse. Use the tools that make you most productive. For me, that's DDG. For you, maybe not. But I think "...there is no reason to switch to them" just isn't accurate in general.
  - Garbage 14y ago
    For 80-90% of my queries it gets me to the same place as Google just as quickly, or more quickly in some cases By quickly, do you mean in less time (search speed is more), or in fewer clicks (search quality is more / relevant links are above)?
    - glesica 14y ago
      I was thinking of wall time, but in general the number of clicks is the same. Again, for me. YMMV. I suspect we all tend to search for the same types of things over and over. Ruby developers search for Ruby docs and modules, stamp collectors search for auctions and information about stamps, etc. So I fully understand that my experience won't be shared by everyone.
  - there 14y ago
    Unfortunately for me, the most used !bang function was "!g" to re-run the search on Google. I used DDG daily for months as my default search engine and on about half of all my queries (most of them technical searches), it would give poor enough results that I'd scan the page, re-run the query with "!g " and find a useful result on Google in the first or second listing. I finally admitted to myself that I was wasting too much time having to run so many searches twice and I switched back to Google.
calinet6 14y ago
This would be wonderfully true if only their search results were anywhere near as good.
lambda 14y ago
I tried setting my main search engine to DuckDuckGo once. I switched back to Google after trying to search for maps and local results. One of the really important features that Google offers me is Google Maps. Not having that kills DuckDuckGo for me, even if their normal search results were to work just as well.
- zck 14y ago
  In DuckDuckGo, searching for map! place I'm going to redirects you to google maps with the same query.
  - lambda 14y ago
    Yes, but with Google, I don't have to think about that; I just type "place I'm going" (which is frequently copied & pasted, so I'm not even typing, and adding "map! " would be a separate step), and I'm done. And it's not just for maps; it's also local results, like when you search for "japanese food some place" and get a list of several places with a map and aggregated ratings. For instance, when I do "japanese food place I live" on Google, I get a bunch of relevant results with star ratings, and the best one is on top. When I do the same on DDG, I get links to several other restaurant aggregator sites like GrubHub, Yelp, Urbanspoon, and so on, plus one link to a restaurant that only lasted a few months before closing. If I'm going to do "map! place name" in order to get map results, I might as well just use Google; DDG isn't adding anything. Google is a place where I can type "thing I'm looking for", and get, most of the time, the answer I'm looking for, while with DDG that's just not true.
- nsmartt 14y ago
  This is where the !bang syntax comes in handy. In areas where ddg isn't quite "there," they offer the !bang syntax. !gm {query}or !gmaps {query} will redirect you to Google maps.
fchollet 14y ago
DuckDuckGo has a tasteless name, tasteless logo, and awful webdesign. That alone is enough for me not to switch. I believe the idea of integrating and presenting results from various specialized sources has a bright future in search, but DDG doesn't handle it very well right now. It might be in the future Google will leverage the same logic to improve its search experience. Google's "Knowledge graph" seems to me to be a step in that direction. And when Google does it, chances are that it will outperform years of DDG's effort in mere weeks.
blantonl 14y ago
Ok, so how does DuckDuckGo generate revenue?
- jrockway 14y ago
  By selling ad space.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
sevenstar 14y ago
Go DDG!
tferris 14y ago
What I like about DDG: - Somebody is trying to improve the search engine space which is too long dominated by just one party (which admittedly makes a damn good job) What I don't like: - I don't see any improvements - Don't like their name - Crappy logo - Too long domain name (with some skills and little money, a great 4-letter dot com is a no brainer) - The product is awkward to use: the entire UI is the #1 reason to leave and aesthetically not pleasing, too many colors (red, blue, green), no CI, favicons are distracting, screen real estate isn't used effectively, mouse over effects are distracting and feel like clumsy Web 2.0 sites in 2005 => even Bing's new interface is very much nicer - Search results got better but seem to lack any relevance algorithm such as Google's Pagerank - Shortcuts are nice but more some kind of an gimmick than real revolution and they are not helpful at all because people who do not use DDG regularly forget them: either they have to be displayed all the time somewhere next to the results or directly on the landing page or they have to be consistent and expressive as Google's syntax which is "site:<site_to_be_searched> query"—if this shortcuts are one of DDG's main features then they have to tell it. - No autocomplete, no instant search I think DDG's and the team main problem is a heavy lack of product vision—they just think search is a great business model (yes it is) and they want to do something to just be better than the market leader. And this 'something' is their biggest weakness, they just don't know what to improve, on what to focus. Google's search is so good, that it's gonna hard to improve but still there are some fields where Google can be beaten (anonymous search, irrelevant results for longer queries because of SEO gaming/blackhat). Instead they just brought up a really ugly design and the user wonders all the 15 seconds he's exploring DDG why he should use DDG. DDG has to pick one of Google's weaknesses and focus just on this and they have also to position DDG accordingly and communicate this focus/USP heavily. Otherwise DDG is like G+ to FB, just a bad copy. I can image how hard it must be to build a search engine from scratch, there's just too much tech involved and crawling all the web could take months even if you have hundreds of servers (imagine: Google crawls even smaller sites with more than 20,000 pages per day (!), how does anyone want to build such crawling power with little VC money and some hype posts from Fred Wilson??). But maybe that's the chance: a new player has to focus on something small—a feature, a content niche, whatever, just a MVP that is in its core much, much better than Google. Building and promising the entire Google search experience will lead to fail.
- 14y ago
rsingel 14y ago
Actually today DDG was totally useful. I was trying to find a result for "Marketly LLC DMCA" trying to run down the top company filing DMCA reports with Google. Google was useless. DDG got me to a Chilling Effects page. Lots of time when I use !G but today, DDG saved the day.
nostromo 14y ago
The comments on HN in the past few weeks have been so mean spirited. What happened? I chalked Facebook up to schadenfreude -- but DDG?
- jaems33 14y ago
  I have no idea. Even the Zuckerberg marriage thread was a disaster. I felt like some of those comments were from Yahoo news.
- boyter 14y ago
  Perhaps HN is at the tipping point that killed Digg? I hope not. Or at least that PG enforces his right to ban people over comments that can only be described as hash and not constructive.
- huhtenberg 14y ago
  Just look at the contents of the front page. It's no longer Hacker News, it's mainstream Tech News with a bit of nerdy sprinkle. The older audience is heavily diluted with those who push pseudo-tech cruft (like a woman suing a VC) to the front page, the same people who also comment more and don't really get the spirit of the board. HN is at its tipping point. I am eagerly waiting for HN2... that's assuming one hasn't been started already and kept private.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
  - dalore 14y ago
    So what happened to slashdot, then reddit, and now hackernews?
  - pg 14y ago
    http://news.ycombinator.com/classic http://news.ycombinator.com/classic shows what the frontpage would look like if we only counted the votes of people who joined HN in the first year. It looks pretty much the same. The comments are declining though, I admit that.
Cyranix 14y ago
I'm quite surprised at the amount of vitriol for DDG in the comments here. I switched many months ago -- probably nearing a year now -- and haven't looked back. I definitely appreciate the effort that has been put into privacy and simplicity. The zero-click box has come in handy at times (though I often find myself clicking through the box anyway, in which case it's a glorified top result, and that's okay with me). My most used feature by far, though, has been the bang syntax, to reference the Java API or search HN or check Stack Overflow or pull up a Google map or explore Wikipedia. I think the bang syntax experience might be frustrating for people who navigate to DDG and then type in a bang query... but if you've got DDG set as your browser's default search, the bang syntax is a nice timesaver: open a new tab (autofocus into the URL bar), type in your site-targeted query, hit Enter, done. I save one page load every time I do a site-specific search, compared to what my experience would be on any other search engine, and considering the proportion of my browser time spent in searches, I think that's a decent amount of time saved. [I mean, there are people on HN who quibble over how many keystrokes they can save in their terminal aliases, after all!] That doesn't mean I think DDG is perfect; my major annoyance is results from content farms (same as any major search engine), but I'm hard pressed to find a search engine that weeds out content farms without sacrificing the features I like from DDG. The name doesn't roll as trippingly off the tongue as some other sites, but is it really that much worse than any of the other search engines (or names of YC companies, for that matter) and does the name affect my ability to use the site? As you hyperbolically express your disgust towards DDG, please remember that you don't get any points in life for hating a product that you aren't forced to use and that other people find helpful.
- impldefined 14y ago
  You're being overly sensitive. He didn't say something bad about your mother, he pointed out what was wrong with a thing, a product and IMO he was mostly right.
damian2000 14y ago
I just tried it - it rocks ... and the people saying their logo or website design sucks are kidding themselves.
barik 14y ago
I've become a loyal fan of DuckDuckGo. In November of 2011, just for the heck of it, I decided to e-mail support@duckduckgo.com about an issue (the difficulty of performing academic searches). I was extremely impressed when I received a response from Gabriel Weinberg himself. I have been using DuckDuckGo exclusively ever since. At first, I had a lot of reservations about switching and found myself using g! quite often. Then I realized that I wasn't necessary more impressed with Google results, I was just __used__ to it. For instance, I hated DDG's zero-click info sources, because I would mentally ignore it. It seemed like a waste of space. Now it's the first thing I look at when the search results show up -- and it's generally what I want.

51 points by bastardsage 14y ago

Am I the only one that struggles with the name "DuckDuckGo?" The unprofessional name makes it really hard for me to want to use the service, even if it has nice targeted results that may be more relevant or higher quality than Google's. Maybe "unprofessional" is not the right adjective, but I can't find the right one. I have the same problem with "Bing" - the logo is just such an eyesore, and the marketing is so obnoxious ("Decision Engine?").

EternalFury 14y ago
Relevant search results is all I care about when I use a search engine. (Oh, and I don't see how "Google" sounds professional.)
- andywhite37 14y ago
  I agree that the content is what matters, but I just feel like it's a crying shame that a service like DuckDuckGo will never be taken seriously because of its name.
  - adventureful 14y ago
    Same problem Mamma.com and Dogpile have (not comparing search quality).
nsmartt 14y ago
You aren't. I've seen the debate a few times on HN, and I've had it with friends who also opt to use DuckDuckGo. It's "a bad name." It isn't evocative, it can't be (easily) made into a verb, and it lacks brevity. I don't really like the name, but I'm oddly comforted that I can shorten it to ddg (and use http://ddg.gg http://ddg.gg). I can deal for now, but I do think it should change.
blantonl 14y ago
Am I the only one that struggles with the name "DuckDuckGo?" You know, there is a company called "Yahoo!" which did OK for a while.
GlennS 14y ago
It would certainly prevent me from recommending it to friends. Just too embarrassing.
cdmoyer 14y ago
I think the name is the only reason I remembered it long enough after hearing about it to try it and eventually switch. I have had no issues recommending it.
- andywhite37 14y ago
  That's a good point, the name is definitely memorable.

jebblue 14y ago

It looks like a cheap knock-off of Google and doesn't give me the hit count for "Ubuntu" (or I missed it). Google gives me over 200 million, Bing over 44 million.

thematt 14y ago
How is that in any way a useful statistic? Who cares about 200+ million results vs. 44 million? Most people don't look at the fifth result, let alone the 200 millionth one. What matters is the first page and whether those top results are the best and most relevant for a given query.
- jebblue 14y ago
  It's useful to me, I've looked at it for over a decade, I want to get a good feeling that my search engine is doing everything it can to scour the Internet and is not filtering my search results out, they prioritize and that's cool.
runako 14y ago
>> Google gives me over 200 million, Bing over 44 million. Is that relevant to your evaluation of a search engine? I don't care how many hits the engine shows, just what it shows in the first 3 links or so. The rest is noise.
- jebblue 14y ago
  You bet, you can't plan a trip to the farthest reaches of the Universe on only a few data points.
wahnfrieden 14y ago
Just so you know, at least Google's hit count is usually off by several orders of magnitude. It's comforting to see it, but it's almost entirely inaccurate.
- jebblue 14y ago

adgar 14y ago

I've never seen someone describe a middleman so enthusiastically. Not that there isn't enormous added value in presentation or that duckduckgo has a poor offering at all - but your search result quality will always be limited to that of your partner-competitors' (Bing index in this case). And the more you succeed, the more expensive your partnership grows: see Netflix. Wait a minute. I just remembered the other added value: privacy. Now that I think about it, I know a few middlemen/middlewomen that I'd describe enthusiastically myself!

duckduckgouser 14y ago
I think middleman is a bit harsh. DuckDuckGo is providing a service. It isn't something that someone else can easily do themselves.
- tferris 14y ago
  Which service? Taking the Bing API, building a frontend, a parser for few shortcuts and get some VCs to blog about me? Sounds like a project from a 48h hackathon.
  - boyter 14y ago
    It does, but Gabriel (the guy behind it) described the issue with that approach quite well here, http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/11/code-icebergs.html http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/11/code-icebergs.ht... Keep in mind quite a few people have done this before, bitcircle, 4hoursearch etc... spring to mind but DDG has actually done some innovations in the space and is still around. The fact that people know it will still be around next year encourages you to at least play with it.

einhverfr 14y ago

The question I have is as to their business model. There's a saying--- if you aren't buying a product, you are the product. So they have one paid link per page. Is that enough to make them profitable eventually?

thematt 14y ago
I don't see why not. Their costs are probably minimal (some servers + salaries). Beyond that they're just leveraging all the work of Bing and others. Also, they've taken barely any VC money, so it's not like there's a huge return expected in the first place.

adventureful 14y ago

Nice to see DuckDuckGo get more media exposure, however that article was disappointingly short and lite. Seemed to cut off abruptly.

suking 14y ago

I'm so sick of these DDG stories. The truth is no one uses them, 99.9999% of people outside SV have never heard of them and currently there is no reason to switch to them.

glesica 14y ago
I switched. For 80-90% of my queries it gets me to the same place as Google just as quickly, or more quickly in some cases. For the other 10-20% there's the !bang syntax, which also lets me search images and maps right from the Chrome address bar without ever hitting the mouse. Use the tools that make you most productive. For me, that's DDG. For you, maybe not. But I think "...there is no reason to switch to them" just isn't accurate in general.
- Garbage 14y ago
  For 80-90% of my queries it gets me to the same place as Google just as quickly, or more quickly in some cases By quickly, do you mean in less time (search speed is more), or in fewer clicks (search quality is more / relevant links are above)?
  - glesica 14y ago
    I was thinking of wall time, but in general the number of clicks is the same. Again, for me. YMMV. I suspect we all tend to search for the same types of things over and over. Ruby developers search for Ruby docs and modules, stamp collectors search for auctions and information about stamps, etc. So I fully understand that my experience won't be shared by everyone.
- there 14y ago
  Unfortunately for me, the most used !bang function was "!g" to re-run the search on Google. I used DDG daily for months as my default search engine and on about half of all my queries (most of them technical searches), it would give poor enough results that I'd scan the page, re-run the query with "!g " and find a useful result on Google in the first or second listing. I finally admitted to myself that I was wasting too much time having to run so many searches twice and I switched back to Google.

calinet6 14y ago

This would be wonderfully true if only their search results were anywhere near as good.

lambda 14y ago

I tried setting my main search engine to DuckDuckGo once. I switched back to Google after trying to search for maps and local results. One of the really important features that Google offers me is Google Maps. Not having that kills DuckDuckGo for me, even if their normal search results were to work just as well.

zck 14y ago
In DuckDuckGo, searching for map! place I'm going to redirects you to google maps with the same query.
- lambda 14y ago
  Yes, but with Google, I don't have to think about that; I just type "place I'm going" (which is frequently copied & pasted, so I'm not even typing, and adding "map! " would be a separate step), and I'm done. And it's not just for maps; it's also local results, like when you search for "japanese food some place" and get a list of several places with a map and aggregated ratings. For instance, when I do "japanese food place I live" on Google, I get a bunch of relevant results with star ratings, and the best one is on top. When I do the same on DDG, I get links to several other restaurant aggregator sites like GrubHub, Yelp, Urbanspoon, and so on, plus one link to a restaurant that only lasted a few months before closing. If I'm going to do "map! place name" in order to get map results, I might as well just use Google; DDG isn't adding anything. Google is a place where I can type "thing I'm looking for", and get, most of the time, the answer I'm looking for, while with DDG that's just not true.
nsmartt 14y ago
This is where the !bang syntax comes in handy. In areas where ddg isn't quite "there," they offer the !bang syntax. !gm {query}or !gmaps {query} will redirect you to Google maps.

fchollet 14y ago

DuckDuckGo has a tasteless name, tasteless logo, and awful webdesign. That alone is enough for me not to switch. I believe the idea of integrating and presenting results from various specialized sources has a bright future in search, but DDG doesn't handle it very well right now. It might be in the future Google will leverage the same logic to improve its search experience. Google's "Knowledge graph" seems to me to be a step in that direction. And when Google does it, chances are that it will outperform years of DDG's effort in mere weeks.

blantonl 14y ago

Ok, so how does DuckDuckGo generate revenue?

jrockway 14y ago
By selling ad space.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

sevenstar 14y ago

Go DDG!

tferris 14y ago

What I like about DDG: - Somebody is trying to improve the search engine space which is too long dominated by just one party (which admittedly makes a damn good job) What I don't like: - I don't see any improvements - Don't like their name - Crappy logo - Too long domain name (with some skills and little money, a great 4-letter dot com is a no brainer) - The product is awkward to use: the entire UI is the #1 reason to leave and aesthetically not pleasing, too many colors (red, blue, green), no CI, favicons are distracting, screen real estate isn't used effectively, mouse over effects are distracting and feel like clumsy Web 2.0 sites in 2005 => even Bing's new interface is very much nicer - Search results got better but seem to lack any relevance algorithm such as Google's Pagerank - Shortcuts are nice but more some kind of an gimmick than real revolution and they are not helpful at all because people who do not use DDG regularly forget them: either they have to be displayed all the time somewhere next to the results or directly on the landing page or they have to be consistent and expressive as Google's syntax which is "site:<site_to_be_searched> query"—if this shortcuts are one of DDG's main features then they have to tell it. - No autocomplete, no instant search I think DDG's and the team main problem is a heavy lack of product vision—they just think search is a great business model (yes it is) and they want to do something to just be better than the market leader. And this 'something' is their biggest weakness, they just don't know what to improve, on what to focus. Google's search is so good, that it's gonna hard to improve but still there are some fields where Google can be beaten (anonymous search, irrelevant results for longer queries because of SEO gaming/blackhat). Instead they just brought up a really ugly design and the user wonders all the 15 seconds he's exploring DDG why he should use DDG. DDG has to pick one of Google's weaknesses and focus just on this and they have also to position DDG accordingly and communicate this focus/USP heavily. Otherwise DDG is like G+ to FB, just a bad copy. I can image how hard it must be to build a search engine from scratch, there's just too much tech involved and crawling all the web could take months even if you have hundreds of servers (imagine: Google crawls even smaller sites with more than 20,000 pages per day (!), how does anyone want to build such crawling power with little VC money and some hype posts from Fred Wilson??). But maybe that's the chance: a new player has to focus on something small—a feature, a content niche, whatever, just a MVP that is in its core much, much better than Google. Building and promising the entire Google search experience will lead to fail.

14y ago

rsingel 14y ago

Actually today DDG was totally useful. I was trying to find a result for "Marketly LLC DMCA" trying to run down the top company filing DMCA reports with Google. Google was useless. DDG got me to a Chilling Effects page. Lots of time when I use !G but today, DDG saved the day.

nostromo 14y ago

The comments on HN in the past few weeks have been so mean spirited. What happened? I chalked Facebook up to schadenfreude -- but DDG?

jaems33 14y ago
I have no idea. Even the Zuckerberg marriage thread was a disaster. I felt like some of those comments were from Yahoo news.
boyter 14y ago
Perhaps HN is at the tipping point that killed Digg? I hope not. Or at least that PG enforces his right to ban people over comments that can only be described as hash and not constructive.
huhtenberg 14y ago
Just look at the contents of the front page. It's no longer Hacker News, it's mainstream Tech News with a bit of nerdy sprinkle. The older audience is heavily diluted with those who push pseudo-tech cruft (like a woman suing a VC) to the front page, the same people who also comment more and don't really get the spirit of the board. HN is at its tipping point. I am eagerly waiting for HN2... that's assuming one hasn't been started already and kept private.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- dalore 14y ago
  So what happened to slashdot, then reddit, and now hackernews?
- pg 14y ago
  http://news.ycombinator.com/classic http://news.ycombinator.com/classic shows what the frontpage would look like if we only counted the votes of people who joined HN in the first year. It looks pretty much the same. The comments are declining though, I admit that.

Cyranix 14y ago

I'm quite surprised at the amount of vitriol for DDG in the comments here. I switched many months ago -- probably nearing a year now -- and haven't looked back. I definitely appreciate the effort that has been put into privacy and simplicity. The zero-click box has come in handy at times (though I often find myself clicking through the box anyway, in which case it's a glorified top result, and that's okay with me). My most used feature by far, though, has been the bang syntax, to reference the Java API or search HN or check Stack Overflow or pull up a Google map or explore Wikipedia. I think the bang syntax experience might be frustrating for people who navigate to DDG and then type in a bang query... but if you've got DDG set as your browser's default search, the bang syntax is a nice timesaver: open a new tab (autofocus into the URL bar), type in your site-targeted query, hit Enter, done. I save one page load every time I do a site-specific search, compared to what my experience would be on any other search engine, and considering the proportion of my browser time spent in searches, I think that's a decent amount of time saved. [I mean, there are people on HN who quibble over how many keystrokes they can save in their terminal aliases, after all!] That doesn't mean I think DDG is perfect; my major annoyance is results from content farms (same as any major search engine), but I'm hard pressed to find a search engine that weeds out content farms without sacrificing the features I like from DDG. The name doesn't roll as trippingly off the tongue as some other sites, but is it really that much worse than any of the other search engines (or names of YC companies, for that matter) and does the name affect my ability to use the site? As you hyperbolically express your disgust towards DDG, please remember that you don't get any points in life for hating a product that you aren't forced to use and that other people find helpful.

impldefined 14y ago
You're being overly sensitive. He didn't say something bad about your mother, he pointed out what was wrong with a thing, a product and IMO he was mostly right.

damian2000 14y ago

I just tried it - it rocks ... and the people saying their logo or website design sucks are kidding themselves.

barik 14y ago

I've become a loyal fan of DuckDuckGo. In November of 2011, just for the heck of it, I decided to e-mail support@duckduckgo.com about an issue (the difficulty of performing academic searches). I was extremely impressed when I received a response from Gabriel Weinberg himself. I have been using DuckDuckGo exclusively ever since. At first, I had a lot of reservations about switching and found myself using g! quite often. Then I realized that I wasn't necessary more impressed with Google results, I was just __used__ to it. For instance, I hated DDG's zero-click info sources, because I would mentally ignore it. It seemed like a waste of space. Now it's the first thing I look at when the search results show up -- and it's generally what I want.