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http://duckduckgo.com/about.html

Of course it is subjective, but it really should be better across a wide swatch of searches. I think it is most clear though on what is X searches. The information view (from the home page) goes even further on these type of searches and grabs topic summaries in real time.

Other areas where I think we do noticeably better on average are with names and long un-quoted searches (5+ words). Of course you can find counter-examples everywhere...

What I always suggest to people is to give it a week as your primary search engine. If you (or anyone) do/does, I'd really appreciate you getting back to me with your feedback.



I used DDG for an hour, and although I like the zero-click, I'm going to change back to Google: I've had a few searches like this:

http://duckduckgo.com/?q=gwt+log+javadoc&v=

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=gwt+lo...

Which Google performs better at.


Very initial impression:

* I like the zero-click info.

* Is disambiguation redundant? Can't you just infer from history and location? Or is this against your privacy policy?

The single most frustrating thing I find about search engines is iterating a non-trivial search. It doesn't seem like DDG has an edge against Google here. I long to see a search engine that makes it easy to send a question off to Quora, Vark etc.


How would that work exactly in your mind? We already have a feature to send your search to hundreds of other sites, http://duckduckgo.com/bang.html

Is it as simple as redirecting you to those sites, or do you mean manage the workflow, email you the results, etc.?


(I like the bang feature: many of my searches are of the form "wiki william henry harrison". By the way, I think the search results for http://duckduckgo.com/?q=william+henry+harrison are out of order)

My ideal search-engine would be a cross between a traditional search-engine (machine) and a Q&A site (humans). If you were taking a lot of iterations to find your answer, you could simply expand the text-area to allow you to write out a human question.

So, short of DDG becoming also a Q&A site....yeah, dunno :P.


Last time I looked at DDG, it required javascript. That's a negative in my book.




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