Pretty impressive results for the terms I searched for. Unfortunately, the design made me temporarily go blind.
In all seriousness, the name is pretty horrible and I "feel" as if I am using a website, not a tool. Google feels like a tool - I get in an out quickly, it doesn't invade my flow. Your application (and others, like Mahalo) are so visually invasive I would never use them, no matter the results that we returned.
Not really a design thing - although it stems from the design - more like a workflow thing... I dunno, hard to describe.
I agree with you. I really like it. Worked well for me. I'm also incredibly impressed with the results. Is this a search engine grown from the ground up with its own crawler or is it using an existing dataset? If self-created this must be worth something right now
Duck Duck Go's site says it was in development for about a year. If it was indeed built on top of BOSS, the developer must've spent 10 months doing pretty much nothing.
Ahh, ok - I was completely blown away by what looked like a 1-man creation :) Indeed, I still think its great for one person to have done this. Gonna look at Yahoo! Boss now. Thanks for this
Thanks for the feedback. I would very much like it to be a "tool" as you describe. I've gone through many design iterations, and have tried to keep the "clutter" down to a minimum.
I would be interested to know what specific design elements you think are contributing to this problem. I know you said it isn't really a design problem, but there has to be more to say about it :) Colors? The results on the right?
The huge font size is reminiscent of text intended for small children, which combined with the colorful logo makes the site look childish in my eyes. It's furthermore bigger than most text on the web, which makes it paradoxically harder to read for me. Flashy stuff tends to catch the attention of young people, but it tends to be tiring past a certain age (I'm 29). It also reduces information density, but this may be intentional.
That said, the results are very good, the classification by topic well done, and the small descriptions are a good alternative to the usual SERP extracts. I had troubles with queries typed in French (It turned mostly results in English), but I assume you're focusing on the English language at the moment.
Besides, the layout is clean and unobtrusive. I agree with axod and aroxwell regarding caching (one "batch" of results ahead should be enough)and pagination, and with ambulatorybird regarding the length and lack of fluidity of the name. At least one these characteristics should be dropped.
I think the font size is the most obtrusive to begin with - it's just insanely huge. I'm a Web 2.0 fan as much as the next guy and think most websites use a font size that is to small but... ouch.
I think that would be a good place to start - once you do that you may find that the mouseovers are distracting or jump around way to much now that your line-heights are smaller. Jury seems to be out on those, personally I'm not a fan but enough people said they do like them that it's a questionable change.
I think limiting the use of mouseovers could be valuable. By making off-site links (the actual SERPs) not have a mouseover while making in-site links (narrowing of categories, the more... link to activate BOSS, etc) could offer a subconcious identifier to your users as to what the next action will actually do.
For me, the highlight-and-underline-on-hover effect is very distracting. It would be nice if the search entry field had a stronger visual separation from the search results. There also needs to be a stronger visual separation between each search result. This might just be that I'm so heavily conditioned by Google, but I'm thrown off by the results being so far from the left edge of the screen. Also, the red, it's a little harsh, and the font size, it's a little big.
Otherwise, though, just playing around, this seems like a really nice search engine, the results seem great. If I didn't think it had a lot of promise, I wouldn't have posted a critique.
Regarding the "highlight-and-underline-on-hover effect", I liked that. It is really nice that the whole text area works as a link, clicking on a hit is easier. And the highlight, well, highlights that.
I agree about the name, but at the same time, DogPile was able to be successful for a time (maybe they still are? I have no idea) with what is arguably a worse name.
Your engine actually seems superior to Google in some ways, which is fantastic. I've always wondered if a single person could do something technologically novel in search; you seem to have done so. I wouldn't be surprised if your engine opens the doors to real, widespread innovation in search.
Your UI isn't great, though. Some unordered points:
• Your name is bad.
• Your text is too big.
• The whole thing feels too unprofessional.
• You need to show more search results by default. Four results feels claustrophobic. People won't get overwhelmed, they've been living with long results lists for ten years.
• You need to make the traditional ordered list of results distinct from the other pieces of information that your search engine thinks are relevant. Right now it can be hard to distinguish results from extras, and I think that will be an impediment to getting users (if getting users is in fact your goal). In particular, don't put the topic-filtering questions above the results — put them to the side.
• Don't highlight the result that I'm mousing over.
• Get rid of the little arrows next to links.
Actually, I'd suggest going to Google, writing down every difference between their UI and yours, and asking yourself why you did it differently. I don't think the Google UI is necessarily the ultimate way to present search results, but I don't think you've added much, either, and theirs is pretty damn good.
Technology: right now your search engine doesn't seem to understand that recent events are more important, typically, than past ones; a search for "explanation of the economic crisis" didn't produce anything in the top four results (although the fifth one, ironically, was relevant). Google gave me what I was looking for (although it's notable that if I hadn't been looking for stuff about the current crisis, your engine would have been better).
The text is exactly right for a different way of looking at search results - like a little generated topical page rather than like a list of links.
Unprofessional is good! Professional = boring. Altavista was "professional".
Four good results is enough.
You aren't getting the whole "looks like a topical page" thing. The mixed sources of results are evidently nondistinct for a reason!
Yeah, the highlight is annoying. Breaks the unified flow.
Arrows are hints evidently copied from Wikipedia. It goes with the design and it's a visual hint they link off-site. Makes sense to me! Moreover, it made such immediate visual sense i didn't even see them as distinct elements until you described them.
I'm actually pretty impressed. Searched for "Epigram" first and it came up with the programming language as the first result, along with Conor's homepage. Searched for "Arya Stark" and it came up with the Westeros fan wiki and Wikipedia entry. Searched for Hacker News, and the site was the first hit. Searched for my name (a tough one, since lots of people share it), and came up with my FriendFeed page, Write Yourself a Scheme in 48 Hours, and a support question I left on the webfaction forum.
Couple comments:
What's with the Wink and PeopleFinder links? Partnerships? They're almost never what I want, and putting them up top is distracting.
The AJAX-load-more-results-on-scroll feature is cool, but I found it a little jerky and distracting. This could be because just hold down the down arrow, so I go really fast and often hit the end of the page while it's loading. Any way to make the transition a little smoother, maybe by preloading results and only displaying them as you scroll, maybe by a fade or slide transition?
The name consists of three stressed syllables, which is hard to say fluidly. You can't turn it into a verb, like "google". This may cause problems with marketability. I am being totally serious.
So that's what was missing! I knew something was disrupting my normal flow of analyzing search results... and now that you mention it I realize I usually look at the URL's, sometimes even before the article title.
Great work!
One more thing I think is necessary, you should clearly mention in the about page that you are feeding from Yahoo search result as well. It is fair to the user and to Yahoo.
Yahoo BOSS's terms do not require attribution though: http://developer.yahoo.com/search/boss/ . I don't think most users would care as much either; we hackers care a lot coz we're baffled with "how in the world did this one guy do this?!". (Even with BOSS being used for some results, this is still very impressive.)
Although it might help the service get more credibility by mentioning that Yahoo results are also used.
Definitely, because you have many more types of links than a normal search engine--some of them are requests for clarification. A URL tells the user "This is a 'hit' that will take you to a different website".
@epi0Bauqu I really like it. I'm most impressed with the result set. You aren't giving me annoying messages like "1 billion matches found", just a handful that are pretty accurate. At first glance, most people will say off-the-cuff that this is bad, you're limiting the results. However, a user doesn't need millions of results. Just the ones that work.
It definitely passed my vanity test. I searched on several things I associate with myself and the results were all accurate. Definitely some things left out, but everything shown was good.
Some of the comments others have made about the visual design are half-correct. The helvetica font hurts readability. I'm on a Mac and Windows XP machines side-by-side and its almost blurry. You can't beat Verdana or Arial for readability.
The color scheme is a little odd, mainly for the logo. If you get successful, invest in having a logo professionally designed, but that shouldn't be a focus now.
Keep the ajaxy stuff. Loved it. The "More Topics" bit is perfect.I don't have to click through page after page of pagination to scroll results like on Google. You show me a small set of relevant matches, then if I want more I just click that and there's some more. Very easy to use.
I was very impressed with the results I got for some queries. The images were spot on. The first results were indeed official sites. I liked the fact that I see web results, images, news in one page.
Cons (sorry!):
1. I disliked the name
2. The design was bad. Huge textbox, ugly duck, everything seems scattered around
3. I think I liked the ajaxy interface and the more links, however I would have liked more results in every category (images, news etc) before I had to press "more"
I like the ajax loading. Internet marketing types will like the ability to see the first X pages all on one page without having to set some parameter (as in google)
Yes, the ajax loading is much less intrusive than loading a new page. It makes it far easier to search through the existing results. It needs one or two UI changes:
1) When you click 'more results' add a divider before the first new result to make it clear which new results just appeared. In most cases the first new link will already be highlighted since the mouse will be hovering overy it but any antsy mouser will not have this benefit.
Also, I notice that I have the tendency (and need) to move the mouse off the first new link so I can read it. This is very inefficient so it would best to append the new results one line below the 'more links' link.
2) Consider adding an auto-scroll to put the first new result at the top or middle of the page to reduce scrolling. This may be disruptive, however.
I like the idea, but I agree that the implementation isn't perfect. I would say the solution isn't to drop the [load more results] thing in favor of pagination, but to improve it.
I can't explain exactly why it is annoying as currently implemented, but it is. Somehow, the more results thing needs to be more "fluid". Maybe make the interface more like regular pagination, but just add the results to the bottom of the same page?
The ajax loading is good, but instead of having to click, let it auto load as they scroll down to get the "infinite search results" effect. Also the large amount of whitespace at the bottom is annoying.
Wow, I really like the results, especially the 'see also' section.
(Give a search for "pearl" a go for a good example.)
More focused searches also worked well ("javascript array split" got me the result I wanted).
I also liked the fall back to google domain specific search for "javascript aray split w3schools" although I'm not sure I understand exactly what made it do that.
The result layout needs some work, mostly to make long results easier to scan, but I will probably carry on using this provided I can remember the URL.
Ack. Good results but not yet so impressive that it's a Google killer. I gave it a quick spin and it gave better results than most prospective giant killers, but still not notably better than the giant itself.
Unlike most, I'd be prepared to give it another go at some future date though - so this definitely has some potential. I hope the developer keeps on working on this.
I'm guessing you are using wikipedia to vet the query and determine the type of things to display, and then have some mappings from that into other data sets.
I'm sure there's more to it than that, but very clever.
The fact that everyone is commenting on the design is a good sign, that stuff is easy to change.
Quite simply, I looked at the current state of search and saw a path through which I could add something useful to the space.
There are all sorts of issues with current search, most of which have been discussed on this forum elsewhere. Relevancy is certainly one of them, but there are others too, e.g. spam, clutter, discovery, and UI.
I did something similar with Yahoo! BOSS APIs but I used terminal-liked console as the UI. Sometimes, I really think that it will be more useful for hackers to use a Terminal-liked search engine - http://geeky.siong1987.com. It is a bit slow because the whole application is not well-architectured. I sacrificed too much speed power for the developer feature.
About your application, I think the name of the search engine is really awkward. And, the logo is really too colorful. It seems like a side-project more than a serious project. Anyway, it displayed the results that I expected.
It's annoying. My train of thought when I got there:
Good, clean simple interface. Funny name.
This text box is huge. I don't know if that's good or bad
Everythings scrunched up at the top. I have plenty of vertical room, use it.
I'll search for something... alright why is there a loading bar for a search engine?
This is frusturating having to wait for my results
What? Only 4?
This 'load more results' thing is fairly annoying, just load them for me
I'll try something else... say 'blue wallpaper'
*Oh how handy, I'm at Google now.
Impressive. I "Ducked" one of my new favorite musicians and found a band he was in that I'd never heard of. Top entry was a Wikipedia blurb. I like it.
Name suggestion - start the name with "go", something like "GoDuckDuck" or "GoodSearch" or something much better than that. That way, as people start typing "google", your site shows up in the autocomplete list in the browser and would remind people about your site at the moment they are looking to search for something.
Kudos to you - I think you've done a fantastic job.
Plus it takes balls to venture into a space that's dominated by the mighty Google :-)
FEEDBACK:
* The name sucks - especially the "go" at the end. "Duck duck" I can live with. "Duck duck go" somehow doesn't feel right.
* Fonts/Colors etc - I really wouldn't worry about it. People get used to almost anything once they get good enough results. The hue and cry at reddit when the new version came out is proof enough of that. A few months on everyone has forgotten completely what the old version looked like and it hasn't hurt them any.
Heck, when Google came out their interface wasn't anything to sing and dance about. But now everyone thinks it the bee's knees and the cat's whiskers :-D. Just get good results and worry about the font/logo/colors some other day.
* For a few searches, the results were impressive and I liked the flow (I searched for "Haskell" and "Dragonfly" (the movie) plus my name etc).
I was really getting into it when my search for "Indian Recipes" returned recipes from Karnataka. The "more links" didn't seem to return very good results either. I had to go back to Google (which returned really good results).
* URL's of results - This is another big one. The way the URL's are currently returned is really bad - it looks like part of the text and is difficult to quickly scan for. It's really important for most users to be able to quickly scan the urls of the results. In your current interface we have to depend on the title, which is not half as useful.
Searched for: "best techno music". I was ready for more results on the initial page and tried to scroll down to them. All I got to see was a screen of whitespace. I don't think it would hurt to increase the number of results that you show. Also, I didn't bother to hit the more links button; I guess I've been trained by existing search engines not to do that, and I expect that other people are the same.
Wow, the quality of your search results is really impressive -- I went in expecting another Cuil, but now I intend to give it a spin as my default engine in Firefox.
I was wondering... to the extent that Duck Duck Go takes its cues from "human powered" sites e.g. Wikipedia, are you using a pre-defined list of reliable user-generated sites out there, or is your search engine somehow identifying these algorithmically?
The organization by relevance is interesting, but through some test searches I did, the more obscure the search, the less this helps. Basically, for something with a Wikipedia/Facebook/Myspace/official site it looks nice. However, for something less known or employing more vague terms, the results page look like I mistyped a url and ended up on a page parked for typosquatting.
I like the fact that results are returned by relevance and categorization. However, the lack of visual cues between categories is rather harsh to follow. I think if you were to have a sightly grey background for each category with whitespace between, things would be much easier to look at and comprehend. Otherwise, the results were, for the most part, great.
I think you should state more explicitly that results are gouped and contain links to specialiced searches.
When I searched for Python i.e. I had no idea that clicking on "Python (genus), a group of snakes" would generate more results - I thought it would bring me directly to wikipedia.
Now that I know it I see that you ask me to choose a topic, but I totally didn't see it the first time.
Perhaps you could do s.th to the topic links to make it more clear for first time users that they bring you so to a search for that topic.
some other thoughts:
-Yes the font is too big first, but after using it a bit I actually like it..
-Yes the name is awful first but "duck duck it" is great and I just added it to my firefox searches :)
Congratulations! You took a freakin duck and did the unimaginable and beat google with it!
I agree with what several others have said: I don't like the huge text in the search box, and I need to see more results on a page.
Search results were relevant when I tried "how to make a damascus blade". When I tried to find a story I've been looking for (that I haven't been able to find in other search engines either), I wasn't successful, although I didn't try for very long. Things I'd like to be able to search for: it was linked to from a forum but was not, itself on a forum; near the beginning the main character was hit by a truck; he woke up and found that his life had been a simulation.
So if your search engine would let me find that, I'd be sold. As a general purpose search engine, it looks promising but I'll stick to Google for now.
I like the concept of it but the layout of the results page is...well... not so good. I, like others, was impressed by the results I got for my search, but it was hard to tell what I was looking at for a minute. I didn't instantly know that what I was looking at was in a certain category and so on and so forth. It looked more like a bunch of random text about X topic thrown up on the page in an unstructured manner with hyperlinks to who knows where. I think with a little bit of work on structuring the results that it will be a pretty decent system. Not that I see it rocking the foundation of Google anytime soon, but that doesn't mean Microsoft ;-) they are only 6% after all.
Pretty impressive. I did a few searches (including my name, and the name of a person I knew about a decade ago, Ruby etc) and am definitely impressed with the resultset.
I do agree with the others that the UI could be done a little better, including the colors (a little too vibrant for me) and the name. I don't really care about the home page, since I dont remember the last time I went to Google's homepage.
Once I like a search engine that consistently gives me good results, using FF's Keyword search is the way to go.
All in all, great work, and I certainly wish you luck.
Not bad at all. I guess you're scraping Wikipedia for a lot of the disambiguation descriptions.
The hits in a disambiguated topic after the first page need some work. Many in the wrong topics. But still, not bad for a beginning.
I suggest duckduck.com instead of duckduckgo.com.
The flashy logo page might be the only reason some people use it. They'll like the fact that they can show off that they have found a different tool. But that's just a small set of certain types of people. Me, I'd prefer a simple tool that takes up less space and is less flashy.
Cool (i like the fact that when i searched for duckduckgo the first result was "awesome search engine"). I also searched for google (and it gave me cool results such as it's use as a verb). It worked for technical questions such as NullPointerException and sigsegv so overall it's very cool.Congrats! [Perhaps building an add-on for word and office suites would be great for this type of search engine, i would like it(because of things like what i got out of the google query]
Pretty impressive search results.I think you should change work more on the domain name and user interface.I think it can be a very useful tool for finding relevant information.
My random query for "tears of a clown" worked well. How tied is this to the internet? There might be a market in the Enterprise search world if you are managing the index.
I liked it, I think it has very impressive functionality; I think you won't have a problem selling it to some company. The search market is huge and doesn't end at Google.
Very nice! I like your search results and the image display. However, like other posters here, I think that the text is a bit big and the name could use some work. The one thing I think that you're missing in the UI is some familiarity to ground new users - and most importantly a link to see more links that consistently appears on the first screen without needing to scroll. URLs appearing on all links would be better as well.
very impressed, tried a variety of search terms and got not only what I was expecting but also other hits that were keyword equivalent. ok fair enough it's a little less responsive than google ;o) but I'm guessing you don't have a spare $50 billion to play with! (jk - the speed is fine btw). The thing that needs most attention (imho) is the design, whilst there are good things (the layout of the search results, especially of 'wide' keywords like 'ruby' or 'augustus') I'm less of a fan of the use of red - in design terms red is an emotive, passionate colour, I would recommend perhaps a blue which usually represents safety, security and trust (look at bank colour schemes). You might alos consider green or grey. The red sets me on edge. Love the use of larger fonts sizes, excellent - should be popular with the age > 25 crowd.
All in all very impressed, I wish you the very best of luck and have bookmarked and will continue to use. (Remember to keep Hacker News updated with any new developments!).
I know some people like the duck name. I have the domain "askShare.com" that might work better for you. The top part, ask could be the search input and make a bottom part for share, then have a scrolling list of things people are sharing (feeds, etc). I noticed you have a couple of applications based upon sharing (photos, groups) so you are into sharing.
I like it. Sure the design can use some work but the results are pretty impressive and it's quick. I would follow some of the suggestions to not use AJAX for the loading since it's a bit unintuitive. I would also post the URL to the found result.
I'm also a big fan of commands on the line: "define word" should define it, and so forth. That can potentially be a next step.
awesome work! would you mind telling us how it works? :)
I got decent results, but for a small number of search terms:
When I searched for:
"com surrogate encountered a problem"
I got decent results, but when I searched for
"com surrogate encountered a problem norton ghost"
the results were off completely.
I then tried the second search query with google and got precise results.
Good results, could probably do with a few more results per page. You're doing tons better than cuil :) but so far there is nothing that Google does not already do. Which is, I suppose, the point. Why use your search engine and not Google?
We switched to Google from Yahoo, Alta Vista and the rest because Google was better. What do you have?
Highly relevant results for the band I entered, but not enough to make me want to switch from Google.
It's not that you aren't good, it's just that you aren't great- there's nothing here that would make me want to purposefully break a habit formed over the past seven odd years. Namely, using Google.
I wonder if search has become a commodity, and the reason why Google dominates isn't because of its search engine, it's because of its brand name. Search actually seems a lot like the food industry in that you can't really judge the quality of the product beyond a certain level, yet you care deeply about that quality. Those industries usually tend to become branding plays, not technology plays.
Google's brand does influence its search results. I recall the MSN Live team put the Google logo above their results and people automatically perceived them as more relevant even though the results had not changed.
Not bad actually, if you're not just scraping results from other engines (or even if you are), you should keep working on this. When I did searches, I actually found links I was looking for in the first few results. Name is strange but it could grow on me.
I like it, but if I think for the reasons why I like it, it is probably because this site looks more like an encyclopedia than an actual search engine. It basically brings up the summary of the respective wiki page.
Very nice--fewer links, but they were all of extremely high quality. Suggestion: Throw this up on 99designs and get some better graphics. The current ones seem amateurish, and not in that good Google kinda way.
I definitely agree that the results should be more structured. Also the page should be aligned left because that's what people are used to. Maybe something like this: http://pixtures.s3.amazonaws.com/duck.jpg
The search button is way too big. The text is too big. Shrink everything and fit more information on one page.
Maybe include some "Web links" on every page. Then right align the "More topics" and "More Web links" to the right so people know they're not ordinary links, but instead offer additional functionality.
Overall, I really like it. It looks like you lift a lot of information and links from wikipedia. I think this is a great idea.
I like how it breaks down into categories, eg. 'django' gives the person, web (py framework), etc, but don't like the large fonts, need to scroll down quite a bit to see all results.
you're not catastrophically bad or slow, unlike some others that have shown up lately. good work on avoiding negative points right off the bat.
if the first page doesn't have what i want, i find myself confused as to what my next course of action should be.
my first reaction to all the ajax stuff is "hey, thats kind of cool" my second reaction is "my expections about what should happen when i move my mouse (mostly nothing) are being violated! help!"
in summary: i think you need to do some real usability studies.
I am using Yahoo BOSS as fallback. That message comes up when Yahoo BOSS times out (i.e. double fallback), which unfortunately happens more than it should.
Duck Duck Google is a remnant of earlier functionality that is currently not live. You're right, Google' is simpler than 'Duck Duck Google'.
can you define use cases more clearly? I think the problem with up and coming search engines is that they are always generic, coming up hard against google, which works well for 80% of the cases (simple search), but sucks for 20% (when you do not really know what you are looking for).
do email me at mingyeow@gmail.com if you are interested in more thoughts on how use cases can be more clear!
If you're using firefox, every website has keyboard shortcuts. Just press ' (quote) and start typing a unique word from a link you see. When the link you want is selected, press enter.
pretty cool, seems to use wikipedia to seem semantic... which works most of the time. I just don't see how its possible to break into google's market share or for that sake, Yahoo's or MSN's ...
- I think companies like octopart, that are doing segmented search have a better chance.
Are you scraping wikipedia as a "top priority" node set in your search algorithm? Actually not a bad idea. I typed "Alyssa Milano" in there, since I am a HUGE 'Charmed' fan - anyway - that returned me a wiki article, as well as images, and facebook links, basically everything I really would need to know if I were writing a paper on her, including publicity images and so forth, all right there in one result page.Maybe it is just me, but I thought the colour scheme was kind of fun - different anyway - something for a change - I can definitely see people using this at least as a supplement to google! Good work! :-)
I search for something and get a wikipedia page, a website for a book and the FDA's website above the results which actually interest me. Infact, they are in a larger font than the rest.
Are these sponsored links or something? I'm not sure I dig it.
In all seriousness, the name is pretty horrible and I "feel" as if I am using a website, not a tool. Google feels like a tool - I get in an out quickly, it doesn't invade my flow. Your application (and others, like Mahalo) are so visually invasive I would never use them, no matter the results that we returned.
Not really a design thing - although it stems from the design - more like a workflow thing... I dunno, hard to describe.