DuckDuckGo: A privacy-conscious search engine [LWN.net]

DuckDuckGo: A privacy-conscious search engine

Posted Dec 22, 2011 11:51 UTC (Thu) by njwhite (subscriber, #51848)
Parent article: DuckDuckGo: A privacy-conscious search engine

I've found DuckDuckGo less good at returning somewhat obscure (but relevant to my search) results than Google. This may be a disadvantage of the "vertical search" approach. I suspect Google's "bubbling" might negatively affect this, but I don't keep Google cookies around long enough to experience it (to my knowledge).

Also the !bang syntax never seemed that useful to me. site: is a much simpler and more useful idea. One thing Google got right was being smart about interpreting the search from the query only, without people having to remember or care about any special options.

On the whole though I do like their approach, and wish them luck.

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DuckDuckGo: A privacy-conscious search engine

Posted Dec 25, 2011 1:09 UTC (Sun) by speedster1 (subscriber, #8143) [Link]

> Also the !bang syntax never seemed that useful to me. site: is a much simpler and more useful idea

"site" a great option when you already have narrowed down your interest to a particular site... but in cases where you just know you want results from a particular field -- not pop-culture results for the same term --
it would be great to have something equivalent to Google's now-discontinued category-specific search pages (Linux, Government, etc).

Google may claim that adding "linux" as a search term on every search is equivalent to their abandoned Google Linux search, but it's *not*. If you use Linux as a search term, the results should include the word "Linux". The old search was broader than just pages that mention the word "Linux". For instance, I could get relevant answers from FreeBSD pages that didn't explicitly mention Linux anywhere; with the new technique those pages would either be buried or not even appear.

So what I would like both Duckduckgo and Google to add is category searches (e.g. !freesw or !opensource). Blekko has it exactly right in that regard, but they don't seem to have the depth of crawling yet to answer many of the technical questions that come up as I do my work. Blekko may get there eventually though, I'm keeping my eye on them...