Thursday, March 25, 2010

Quick Thoughts on DuckDuckGo

DuckDuckGo is a search engine. It is a Google competitor. Which also makes it a Bing competitor. Currently, it is a better decision-engine than Bing, and it's rather more useful than Google for certain search terms.

Someone once pointed out that if a search engine were to be built on good design, with a focus on making search results easier to absorb, they'd be able to compete with Google on a more-or-less even scale. DuckDuckGo seems to be doing just that, and I think they're doing it pretty well.

The most amazing thing about it, however, has been that it's all self-funded. And the dude's even responding to feature requests on Hacker News. (He implies that the entire search engine's a one-man show - by that I mean that he says "[Duck Duck Go] is a complicated mashup of my (emphasis added) index/crawler, structured crawls/dumps from crowd-source sites, live vertical APIs, and highly modified BOSS (edited, re-ranked, merged, omitted, etc.))

I think an acquisition seems likely. Still, gotta admire the balls on this entrepreneur for taking Google head-on.

Update: DuckDuckGo's results page for CS3216. Never knew CS3216 was a chemical compound! Hrmm!

Update 2: See searches for Java, Microsoft, and iPad.

4 comments:

Gabriel said...

Hey, thanks for trying it out and the nice write-up. If you haven't guessed yet, I'm the founder :).

Please let me know if you have any feedback.

Wei Man said...

(Hi Gabriel!)

Damn this is freaking useful. I've been searching for tanks (the vehicle) on google and going nuts because I mainly get tank top image links or game links.

Was really amazed when Duckduckgo asked me which kind of tank I want. Like wow.

Would really love to have a search image function though, because what I need is images of tanks for design references. And I can't get them from Duckduckgo...

Would help concept artists lots if we can just get images of what we want when we search words that have many different meanings. >_<

Still, awesome stuff. ^_^

Gabriel said...

Thanks! Yeah, image search should be coming along eventually.

Wei Man said...

Cool! Will be watching out for that. =)