I love DDG's bangs and instant answers. Do you have any statistics on their usage? Like counts of how many times a bang or an instant answer was used?
And will Dax play a bigger role in the future, in branding to give more personality? It wasn't easy finding the name of the duck I see daily. (https://duckduckgo.com/?q=name+of+the+duckduckgo+duck)
Hello,
Congrats for your search engine. I admire the work you did. The only reason I don't use DDG is that I'm Greek and the results for Greek keywords are many orders of magnitude off-mark compared to Google. Why is that? Any hope to improve results in the future?
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Gabriel, do you plan to implement time-bound search filters on DDG? I'm probably not alone in finding it very usefull and would gladly avoid jumping back and forth between DDG and Google. Anyway, kudos for all you've done.
Are there any plans for a Google trends like analysis tool or any plans on opening up anonymous search statistics?
On a personal note, DDG has been my daily driver for about 2 years now. I love the bang shortcuts (!man and !cpp mostly).
The first few months or so, I ended up following almost every search query with a "!g query", but search results have really, really improved. Now I only have to use Google for local topics and/or very recent events.
What are your future plans for DuckDuckGo? Knowing what you know now, what would you have done differently with DuckDuckGo over the last seven years?
As a user, I am always a bit afraid that DuckDuckGo might be gone one day.
How do you keep the DuckDuckGo afloat ?
We don't see too many Philly area firms getting attention on HN. I try to promote the area when I can (here or on Reddit). What would be your top reasons software engineers should consider the Philly tech scene as a place to work and live?
Gabriel, thank you for DDG I have been using and promoting for years.
In terms of mobile any plans for the future you can reveal? How do you feel about Siri, Google Now and Cortana is it something you think DDG can do or can be used as a backend/source ?
Thanks for publishing your book it has been really useful for me.
When you were first working on DDG who did you show it to before you "launched" on here? What kind of early feedback did you get?
Great job w/ DDG and thanks for sharing this encouraging thread.
Congrats and all the best with the book! Happy to participate and hope it can help get my experiences with Reddit, Hipmunk and beyond into as many people's heads as possible.
I'd just like to say thank you for making the search box the first thing that gets focus when pressing Tab.
Google got this one wrong (though I suspect that google does it on purpose).
Is there any chance that you guys could implement a feature like your major competitor's "scholar" search for searching academic articles?
Was this book updated for the Oct 2015 release? Or is this more or less the same as the book you asked when you originally solicited feedback?
Congratulations, Gabriel on all the success you've had so far with DDG and Traction. I was an early user of DDG and although I didn't stick around, I truly do admire you for what you stand for and your courage and perseverance to push through it.
I do believe that it is critical that we do have choices. Choices that can free us from a single establishment. So, thank you!
You're an inspiration. Keep up the great work!
Hey Gabriel,
Just wanted to say thanks for DDG, it's been my default search engine for going on a year now and absolutely love it. I'm also a developer(DDG is also the reason I started to dabble with Perl) from PA (about 10 minutes from DDG) and have to say it's very exciting to see something like DuckDuckGo created in my hometown area. Thanks again for the great work!
Are you working on any new business dev for DuckDuckGo? I feel that no-tracking is a soft value add and I imagine keyword-based targeted ads is limiting when competing with large search engines that tracks more information about the users. Which direction are you taking DuckDuckGo that further differentiates your product?
I think there is real value in consumers being able to glean value they want from their own data, would you or have you ever considered a program that allowed users to share data with you in exchange for services, ads or other products they continually found relevant?
How would you self describe the general search quality of DuckDuckGo, excluding the (brilliant) Instant Answers?
How do you evaluate the general search quality?
Do you have any focus on expanding crawling in general? And localized content in particular?
Perhaps it's completely out of reach (fiscally or ethically) but have you considered partnering with Mozilla to become Firefox's default search engine?
Are there any features that you wanted or thought about implementing into DuckDuckGo but could not for technical reasons or otherwise?
Oops I missed it. In case if you check this sometime, I wanted to know how much of Python is being used at DDG
when will you add instant search results in the browser's search box? For example, if i use Firefox and have Google ad the default, and i type "32 * (13 - 9)" it will instantly show a dropdown with the answer 128. I would really like DDG to do this too.
Hey Gabriel,
Do you have some plans to open source the search engine of DuckDuckGo one day and let people contribute?
Just switched to DDG 3 weeks ago and can't see me going back. :-)
Where did the name for DuckDuckGo come from?
Do you think DDG would have still been a success without the Snowden revelations?
Where is the current best place to buy the book in an electronic format?
How does DuckDuckGo index content? Does it use its own spider?
Great book Gabriel! Excited to help you promote it.
How much traffic does the Tor hidden service for your search engine get? Would you characterize the usage as significant, or is it mainly kept up as a public service for a small number of people who use it?