I don't think so, the people using DDG are still a tiny tiny minority. If they did what google did with the browser market when they released Chrome then you would be warranted in saying they blew it wide open, but for what DDG has done with search? I don't think so, not yet anyway. Maybe when they've penetrated beyond the tech "elite" they might get somewhere, but right now if I ask any of my friends (who are relatively in the know about technology) they haven't heard of DDG.

Personally I don't think DDG will show wide success because the majority of people don't care about the added extras it provides, it's just other search engines (I think their major source is the bing api? Not 100% sure [1]) data with pretty labels and positioning, which very few care for. I search a relatively large amount and what DDG adds doesn't make it worth switching for me because I've become accustomed to how Google displays search results and adapted my behaviour to that.

[1] http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2009/03/duck-duck-go-arc... (potentially no longer accurate which is why I'm not sure)

I think the difference is the attitude is different now - when Cuil launched the world laughed and said nothing could be as good as Google. Almost 3 years later a small, insignificant yet maybe not, number of people are starting to use alternatives.

A good parallel could be Firefox - Internet Explorer was the way to browse the internet, now they're just a way.

If Google wants to be the search engine a decade from now they may have to earn that right all over again.

People laughed at Cuil because it was laughably bad, not because nobody is allowed to make a search engine.

Sure it was bad - but was every decision* they ever made so fundamentally wrong that they couldn't possibly have improved? The world wrote them off completely 8 minutes after they launched, and they were a meme like the next day. (* in search, not their ridiculous perks etc)

When I search for online games on DDG I get stuff like this in the first 'page' of results:

- http://onlinegames.innovative-solutions-group.com/

- http://onlinegames.webfreehosting.net/

- http://online--games.com/

Did DDG and Blekko both independently, really stumble upon formulas that beat Google, or are we actually open to the possibility of not using Google for search now?

Anything can be improved — but in Cuil's case, yes, it would have required reversing pretty much every decision they made (or at least implementing them on such a different level they would be unrecognizable). It was just breathtakingly ill-advised. DuckDuckGo is more clear about the benefits it offers, modest though they may be, and it follows through on its boasts. And Blekko is just modest all around.

I said at the time and still say that Cuill released a very early stage experiment that still hadn't worked out what it wanted to do and called it a search engine.

Thx for the specific example, always very helpful! But in this case, I'm having trouble reproducing. Do you have a region set or something? I'm looking at http://duckduckgo.com/?q=online+games and don't see those domains. I'm not saying the other domains are good :), but I just want to understand what you're seeing. We definitely have a problem right now of over-weighted the domain name in the url.

I'm in latin america (Nicaragua) which might hurt a lot if it's trying to pull localized results from this little corner of the world heh.

http://playtomic.com/ddg.png is what I'm seeing.

Edit:

I'm doing a search from one of my US-based servers and seeing those same sites?

http://playtomic.com/ddg2.png

Ahh, thx. Turns out I was the one with the settings set :). Duly noted!

Yes, I think it would be laughed at today too.

The difference is Matt_Cutts, moultano, nostrademons (Google employees) et al. are all over DDG threads, but weren't on Cuil ones as much, e.g. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=258737 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1255122.

I agree though, that DDG is a blip -- a teeny tiny blip in the search engine market -- so, quite frankly, I'm not sure why they care so much, or at all.

I think the difference in engagement by those guys is that Cuil was trying to be stealth and downplay the hype of being "google 2.0 by ex-googlers" whereas your marketing has been squarely aimed at them.

Intentions aside, Cuil was presented as a "Google killer" to orders of more people than know about DDG. But higher level, I don't think DDG warrants their engagement at all. There are much bigger fish to fry, so-to-speak, and yet I don't see them on all the higher profile search engine stories out there across the Internet.

They care because maybe tomorrow you're not just a tiny blip and they're not as entrenched as they are today. Unlikely? Sure, but it does happen.