duckduckgo - the next upstart

[wheel]

duckduckgo.com, got this off my local linux users group. Yet another search engine.

Search results seem fine.

Their privacy policy is excellent - they don't collect data. The also don't send the referrer field when someone clicks through so website owners can't collect search information from their logs.

The continuous scrolling is fabulous. No more clicking page numbers - scroll to the bottom of the page and another page appears. If that took off it'd dramatically change the way we feel about the serps (as webmasters).

[wyweb]

Boy I sure like that clean look. I knew it was just a matter of time before some new search engine came along touting the exact opposite of what google is doing right now.

From their about page: [duckduckgo.com]

• Privacy — we do not track you. Google does.
• Official sites — labeled and on top.
• Less spam & ads — no ads above results.

That scrolling thing definitely works for me too.

[pageoneresults]

With a name like that, they were doomed for failure the day they purchased the domain. Is that a kids search engine or something?

[brotherhood of LAN]

There results can often look remarkably like Google's

http://duckduckgo.com/faq.html

Can your search engine do this?
• Simpsons characters
• apple
• irs 8889

Created by parsing wikipedia.

http://duckduckgo.com/faq.html

How do you get your results?

From many sources, including DuckDuckBot, crowd-sourced sites, "BOSS" & "Bing".

Good luck to them. If it delivers relevant and unique results, it's good enough to be around.

[edited by: brotherhood_of_LAN at 3:09 pm (utc) on Jul 27, 2010]

[jdMorgan]

The future of duckduckgo is a bit cloudy. It uses Yahoo search results through a Yahoo API. Since Yahoo is now switching to Bing, it's not clear (to me, at least) how that API service might be affected.

I also like the "clean screen," and unlike others, I have found Yahoo's results to be quite acceptable (when researching, I never use just one search engine, and so "different" is better).

Jim

[jimbeetle]

Boy I sure like that clean look.

He, he, he. What SE were we saying that about 12 or so years ago?

Overall, not bad results for some arcane terms I tried. Have to give it a bit more of a go later on.

[SevenCubed]

It's similar to another privacy search engine that I like -- IXquick -- they don't track you and also do not return referring search terms.

[willybfriendly]

I rather like the display of the favicon. Our main site has an animated favicon which really makes it stand out in the SERPs :)

[willybfriendly]

Ended up with a dup post. Ignore....

[dstiles]

Coincidentally I submitted an admin query on their site a couple of days ago. I got a prompt response from the owner and have been discussing bot aspects with him (they do scan sites with DuckDuckBot).

Along with some other new engines they provide the IPs their bots come from. Very useful if your server can't do rDNS lookups to confirm bot identity.

I haven't used the bot except for testing (I use IxQuick/StartPage) but it looks clean and the results seem good.

[SevenCubed]

I went to their site looking for their crawler and IP info to see if it might be blocked in my firewall so just typed in...

"duckduckgobot"

...it gave me...no results ----> try google

:\

[jimbeetle]

That's because the FAQ page that links to the bot page [duckduckgo.com] is noindex, nofollow.

[tangor]

Don't use them, but am pleased with their biz model: they honor robots.txt. I whitelist... which means I 403 any which do not honor. duckduckgo is allowed to robots.txt, and when it becomes obvious there's benefit for crawl, I'll let 'em in.