June 22, 2009
New Search Engine A Pleasure to Use
The name is silly but the features at this new search engine are appealing. Duck Duck Go is a new search engine developed by Gabriel Weinberg in Pennsylvannia. A small blurb on the site says -- "A recent JP Morgan "survey" found that a majority of people would switch search engines if offered less clutter and better results, which is exactly what Duck Duck Go does."
Fair to say - there is much less clutter, and there are several features that may make for better results.
The front search page has options to search information sites, shopping sites or both. The Information choice may be most useful for queries that match on an inordinate number of book titles from Amazon.
Top results may come from Wikipedia or other human-powered source. Most search engines do give Wikipedia high ranking and some special placement. DuckDuckGo gives Wikipedia a box, somewhat in the style of an Ask smart answer.
Suggested Topics breaks down the query into its parts and allows exploration of each.
This helps in widening and exploring a topic. It doesn't help in refining it. The searcher needs to redo the query with more words - there are no search aids for that.
For a suggested topic, if there is more than one meaning, DuckDuckGo lists the meanings and asks you to select. This idea has been around a long time, but this implementation is simple and clear.
No need to click on results - just move the mouse across the page and hit enter key. However, snippets or text about the query result are often very short or there is only the title.
Search It On, a box of icons on the right side, lets one quickly search another source such as WebMD, Twitter, CNet - and many others.
Bookmark and Share lists all the popular services.
Gabriel Weinberg, the creator, and his cat did a short video on the thought that went into this design.
In a response at TechCrunch (Dec 2008), Weinberg explained that DuckDuckGo does its own web crawling, and supplements or enhances by using Yahoo Search Boss . Further, it excludes 40 million spam or parked domains.
Presumably, thanks to the use of Yahoo, Duck Duck Go handles some syntax.
- - sign to exclude
- quotation marks for phrases
- intitle for words in title
- site for domain
For example - intitle:"carbon pricing" site:ca
The font is large, but all in all, this search engine is easy on the eyes and very pleasant to use.
Reviews:
Separate shopping sites from info sites in your search results, Pandia (June 15)
Duck Duck Go: Silly Name, Interesting Search Engine, by Frederic Lardinois, ReadWriteWeb (Apr 30)
Posted by Gwen at June 22, 2009 02:22 PM