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.
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4 comments:
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.
(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. ^_^
Thanks! Yeah, image search should be coming along eventually.
Cool! Will be watching out for that. =)
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