Forget Google I prefer DuckDuckGo – Towards a Better Search Engine
Yes the title of the post is correct and well, I am writing one after a long time. There has been lot of action lately in the social media domain. While working towards refining Social Media metrics and measurability and making things more transparent and understandable for the client, I have been working towards synergizing Social Media with the business objectives for my clients and the journey has been fairly fruitful.
Have stumbled upon a few tools which I found fairly interesting. In this post I am sharing with you a search engine which I digged, DuckDuckGo !! Yes, that’s the name of the search engine, and No, I havent lost my senses!
Strange name, but effective results. Far from the advertisement laden Google results, DDG comes fresh with a new interface and search results which are in contexts better than Google search results. The way DDG classifies search results and shows you the official site for yoru search result (if there is any existing) and then shows the rest of the results is amazing!
Who created DDG?
DDG is the brainchild of MIT grad Gabriel Weinberg, who is self funding the initiative!
I support Weinberg when he promises “less garbage” results. While I am writing this post, I have explored DDG for almost a couple of hours now and I do appreciate the design!
Design – what has it got to do with a search engine?
When you have just a text box on the landing page, what do you need to do with the design of the page? I found it highly intuitive and intelligent of DDG to be giving the user the option of clicking on the many options of internet web sites available on the right sidebar of the screen of your search results.
So, lets say, if I search my name: paritosh+sharma
The first result that comes is my official site:www.paritoshsharma.com followed by the other search results. Now I was fairly amused by the deep search results that I got while doing a name search.
Okay, so I got the search result, now what if I need to see the presence of the searched item on Social Media?
DDG has very intelligently placed links on the right sidebar of the page, which link to various social media channels and other popular sites and an automatic search query goes to the channel which gives the searcher access to your social media profile on the channels directly.
Thus with a single click on the YouTube icon, I reached to my channel on YouTube
Though not a Google yet, but DuckDuckGo is soon predictably going to prove to be a toughie in the search space, creating its own apprecaitive user base.
Paritosh, thanks for the great write-up! You obviouslly get a lot of what I’m trying to accomplish with Duck Duck Go. As you use it, please feel free to send me feedback on anything that comes to mind. That goes for anyone else reading this as well
.
Gabriel Weinberg
Duck Duck Go Founder and CEO
Nice Site !
Being a critic of almost anything [;)] , i’ll jot down a few points :
1. Takes a LOT (notice the caps) of time to show results, as compared to the Big daddy Google.
2. The right sidebar links could have been added to the homepage itself, so that the user could right-away get his customized result, without waiting for the generic result first.
3. The buttons on the right sidebar look as if the were links to bookmark DuckDuckGo to various other websites. A simple note on the top explaining to the user that he/she can further streamline the results would have been very helpful
4. The search shows only 6 links at the result page at the beginning. More results should be there, without the user clicking on “more Links”
5. After the user has clicked on More Links several times, the page becomes too long to handle at a given time.
6. Needs a lot of other features to attract enough people to make it popular.
Thats just for starters. Will comment more when i actually use the service. Nice to see some challengers on the block for the oh-so-mighty-Google. But it would be a VERY hard task to compete with giants like google, live, yahoo etc.
Adios
Mayank Kaushik
Thanks Gabriel, Mayank for your kind words and comments
DDG looks interesting and I am sure it can be branded and positioned strategically to a segmented market, with dedicated user community, which shall take the entire platform viral, hence giving Google a good chase!!
Cheers,
Paritosh
I don’t agree with this post at all.
Not a big google fan personally, but I have to blast on this one
(hope not getting too harsh. The reason being the title of your post – read the post as well comments however) :
1. First of all the design is too confusing. It promises too much, but not able to deliver to the expectation.
2. Don’t even compare this thing with google. There is not even algorithm for relevant results (for longer sentences). Its just relying on other sites for most of the results.
3. Its seem good for searching for single word or person name, say “Paritosh Sharma”. Considering no one in this world will have unique name there is not much left to say. Moreover, There are better option out there. http://www.123people.com/
4. “Far from the advertisement laden Google results.” << Sooner or later (if it works out) this DDG thing will also provide advertisements. Google ads are the most appropriate (both in content as well as visibility/reach whatever parameters you find).
Will post the positive ones also, just wait for that !!!
Ankit Aggarwal
Thanks Ankit for the comments
Well, surely agree to you, I am particularly good insights from people around, and comments from amazing readers of the blog like you are acting as a great MR tool!!
Thanks and looking forward to more participation from you!!
Cheers,
Paritosh
well “DuckDuckGo”…. Nice name first of all!!
coming on to, how well DDG is
well the only plus point that i could find in DDG is that it takes comparatively very less amount of time to get loaded than Google.
apart from it i dint find it worthwile, with all the above mentioned Cons @Ankit And @Mayank, i don think i hav to mention any of those.
and yes i do agree , there are few links on the side bar which comes in very handy but this alone wud not, u know offuscate People to use DDG…
i think that Mr.Weinberg has to put a bit more of himself in this.
i’ll post more as n when i find somthng intrsting.
Thanks Prem for your comments, I think Gabriel, the founder is still working on some new stuff and is looking out on more feedback, surely shall be good to have more comments coming across!!
Cheers,
Paritosh
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