We've been reading epi0Bauqu's posts about DDG here for... what is it now? Over 3 years? At first it seemed like a wonderfully quixotic project - a new, home-grown search engine? Yeah right!

But then a year passed, then another, and traffic was up, and then it was up some more, and it seemed like he would never give up... at some point it stopped looking quixotic, and started to be a joy to watch. Will love to see what the future will bring.

Traffic is easy. Profit is harder - especially if you make it clear from the outset that you're anti-advertising (See Reddit).

Whilst the growth is fun to watch, it's still only 37 direct queries a second, which is nothing.

Also, I know it's been mentioned a million times before, but the name is an artificial ceiling to growth. A large % of people have no clue what duck duck goose is. A large % of people see the name as amateur, childish and stupid.

You are right about that...but years ago I had a service which shall remain nameless that got 10 million hits a month just by removing the tracking links on Google search results.

I didnt make a dime, but I did get calls from spooky people out of the blue who wouldnt identify themselves asking questions.

I admire anyone who pursues this goal, and yet I will never go there again.

I truly wish you would elaborate ;)

I also think that their name is part of the reason for their success. It's different from 'google' or 'bing' or 'yahoo' and it yet it is specific for what it does and I think lends people a partial understanding as to what the benefits are, right out of the box.

I've been getting the DDG newsletters since day 1, but I can't seem to fully adapt to duck duck go. I guess I just am addicted to using google.

=EDIT= For those commenting that they aren't familiar with the name, its interesting that you still understand its a search engine. Thus for you, understanding the context of the name is irrelevant. But for those not familiar with search engines, but do know duck duck goose, I think its pretty logical to explain 'duck duck go' as a search engine.

huh. ok, can someone explain the name, please? i think it must be specific to some (american?) culture.

It's a play on the name of a popular children's game.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck,_duck,_goose

I've never heard of this game. I thought that the name hints to the duck test: "if it walks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_test

I.e. that Duck Duck Go is what it looks it is - it's a search engine. And not some tool which secretly harvests data of its users for its own benefit.

Interesting your mind went there. It's fascinating to see how people categorize things based on prior knowledge and experience.

> I.e. that Duck Duck Go is what it looks it is - it's a search engine. And not some tool which secretly harvests data of its users for its own benefit.

Well, from this point on both are now true. You're assumption is fantastic. (assuming DDG actually STAYS that way!

To the midwesterners, particularly upper-midwest (Minnesota), we are more familiar with, "duck, duck, gray duck", (if that helps).

Google, Bing, et al are ducks and DDG is the goose?

I am American, and I have no idea of what Duck Duck Go means. Possibly an inside joke? I personally think the name is a limiting factor, and they would be better off with something else (DDG?).

"Duck Duck Goose" is a children's game, in which one player touches the others, each in turn, saying "duck" each time, (duck, duck, duck.... ) then saying "goose!" upon tagging someone "it". So that selection process might reflect looking at search engine results and selecting the right one.

I also think there's a double entendre here, in that to "duck" (i.e. to hunch down for cover) relates to privacy. Duck (privacy invasion), duck (more tracking attempts), then go (to your intended destination).

So: pick from a few choices till you find the goose (that laid the golden egg -- but I digress), then go. And keep your head down while you're doing it. I love it.

Final note: an acquaintance of mine recently worked at Google as a project manager. I first learned about DDG from him about 18 months ago. I got the strong impression, even then, that he (and others at Google) were concerned that DDG might take off.

I wish they changed their name to just Duck. Much more clear. Ironically, Google owns duck.com.

On QWERTY keyboards, that's a dangerous typo for a general-purpose search engine...

Two potentially negative typos are one error away - dick and fuck. Maybe there are more but I can't see them; suck?

The duck logo is pretty cool as well.

I also like the red...not because I think it's beautiful (it's not imo but that's subjective) but because it's very distinct and associateable with search

I didn't realise they had done that to ehow. I wonder if they could kill some of the region specific crap. If you search for a company here in Auckland you get these junk sites (localist, hot frog, finda) that have out of data that's been scraped an age ago and for some reason ranks high. This would probably be a deciding factor in browser choice for me.

I didn't either. Disclaimer: I work for Demand Media on another property (Pluck), and have only been here about 10 months. I do know a few people on the various teams that do work with eHow and the titling algorithms, though.

Looks like that was in early 2011, before Panda came and nearly wiped eHow out, and over a year before I started. After that, they made a concerted effort to fix their algorithms and focus on providing good, non-automated content. Are they still considered a content farm to be avoided these days?

I think eHow managed to build up a certain reservoir of whatever the opposite of brand loyalty is among techies, so there's some lingering effect. These days I personally don't think eHow is uniquely bad. I don't think it on average has particularly great content (there are a handful of very good entries, but they're unusual), but it's not spam, or at least not more spammy than seems to be the norm in large-scale commercial media properties. A lot of it is just run-of-the-mill mediocre content on popular keywords, vaguely like About.com or the array of recipe sites, or (with some tilt towards current events) the kind of stuff published by Gawker, HuffPo, Cracked, etc.

To be fair, they own Cracked, too.

On the plus side, I think they're going to use my team's Hackathon project on eHow to replace all the irrelevant remnant ads with relevant, related ones, and clean it up a bit.

I've found that for utterly and moronically basic stuff that I've forgotten about, eHow does an okay job. Of course, I can't speak for anything remotely complicated.

Wow, that's good to see perl 'still' being used by someone that big. I didn't believe you to begin with but to quote the wikipedia article: "The search engine is written in Perl and runs on nginx, FreeBSD and Linux."

Slashdot too, if I could download knowledge into my brain matrix style, perl would be the first thing.

http://slashcode.git.sourceforge.net/git/gitweb.cgi?p=slashc...

Don't you know the golden rule of Perl. Firstly its not replaceable, secondly anything that tries to replace it largely looks and feels like it.

Nonsense. That quote comes from Common Lisp, it was just hopelessly bastardized by some perl people (like everything else in that language :P).

There is massive evidence that disagrees with you, for example look at Ruby and Perl 6.

Just because a principle applied to something first does it now mean it should now never apply to anything ever.

Booking.com is a large online travel agency which is pretty popular in Europe. From a recent job description:

Due to our continuing growth we are in search of Perl Developers for our headquarters in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. We use Perl, Apache, mod_perl, MySQL, Memcache, JavaScript, Git, Linux & more. We do agile software development based on scrum.

I guess we can call that the 90's heritage of Booking.com. Naturally we can't use the same explanation for DDG, which launched less than half a decade ago.

Last I heard the New York Times was 'still' running Perl as well, and they're pretty big...

Adding to the list of Perl shops: TicketMaster, Rent.com, Campus Explorer, and ZipRecruiter (where I work).

Perl's strength is manipulating text. Search engines manipulate text...

Precisely why I, too, believe Perl was chosen.

Craigslist would be another Perl shop. And Media Temple.

A lot of Amazon.com is still Perl...

Are you sure about that? They had a big rewrite some years back and got rid of much of it.

But it also gives very good results for common search tasks. Compared it myself to few other not so known search engines and it gives even better results than Google since it doesn't seem to favor corporate web pages but rather relevant results. Google became too big and too greedy and top of it all caved into the mass surveillance scheme, behind our backs. Why use a search engine and products endorsed by hypocrites. At least yahoo did some minor fight although they are not exactly better either, but that fight did give many of us a warning about what is going on behind the curtains.

I didn't realise they had deleted ehow, is this actually true? Isn't that a bad thing for neutrality? Where do you draw the line?

eHow themselves were bad for neutrality, as it was poor quality link-bait. It's too qualitative to describe the line, but the widespread disdain for eHow is a good requirement for the future.

I personally don't believe results should be removed or altered based on human judgement. What if I decide to start a competing service that Gabriel takes a dislike to? Or decide to start a hate site for DDG[1]? Do they not deserve a place on the internet? Is it up to one person to decide this? For neutrality to work it needs to be neutral for absolutely everyone, or atleast that's how I see it.

[1] These are purely hypothetical. I'm a big fan of both Gabriel and DDG, and I'm not suggesting he would ever do these.

Of course all search engines are "based on human judgement". Is it different if you write a fancy algorithm that detects these and removes them vs. just deleting the site from the index? I don't think there's a difference.

I don't want "search neutrality."

Fortunately any regulatory regime would be an absolute nightmare so I am not worried about search neutrality ever being a big thing. How do you distinguish between relevant search results and a lack of search neutrality?

First, I am sure your comment about language selection was personal. Facebook in large part stands on PHP; does that mean PHP is better than perl?

Second, I am not sure about their future. It looks like its a temporary spark after all the omg-goverment-tracks-my-searches paranoia.

The fact is, if the large organisations such as Google or Microsoft could not admit on the record to participation in PRISM, what makes you think Duck will? Further, if PRISM is real and if large organisations such as Google or Microsoft could not say "no", what makes you think Duck will have an option for a different fate? Lastly, if there is no trucking by gov of your searches, then there is not much different in using Google versus Duck for someone who has been using Google for years and just temporarily switched to Duck.

I think the point was to congratulate DDG on its success, not to say that DDG would be more resistant to the military digital complex.

Their motto is they don't track your history at all, so even if the government asked for information or it became part of prism they would have nothing to give.

Sadly, that would mean legal issues for them :(

Under which law. Current data retention laws are you have to retain what you say you retain. So if your stated policy is 90 days but you only keep 30, you are not compliant. But if you keep 0 and state you keep 0 days you are compliant. Obviously, there are different rules for finance, govt, and medical industries.