Introducing Duck Duck Go
Duck Duck Go may have gone under the radar since its launch in September 2008 but it is in fact an internet search engine that has had some positive feedback from its users. I thought I would take a look at this new search engine, if only to give my eyes a break from the usual suspects’ home pages and logos.
Duck Duck Go bases itself around being a search engine that will provide you with the results you need whilst wiping out the clutter that can often get in the way of a regular search query. Using its own web crawler, the DuckDuckBot, and information taken partly from Wikipedia, it is hoping to make search more relevant.
On first thoughts it doesn’t do much for me in the way of looks and design. Starting with the strange name you are half expecting that the style from there on in would be a little different. The pages look like they have been put together in a children’s art class and the text could do with being tightened up to make it look more professional.
It works by providing a step by step process that starts with search summaries that then lead you on to the correct set of sites for your query that they say, “Will remove the clicking backward and forward normally associated with search results.” Duck Duck Go CEO Gabriel Weinberg explained that “Duck Duck Go uses semantic technology to identify topics within queries and will adjust its results accordingly.”
For my first search I typed in my home town Brighton. After clicking the Brighton I wanted it gave me several options about the city from the local council website to the recently finished Brighton festival website, this keeps it in line with its stance of offering the most official page first of any search.
In all, the first sets of results offer a good choice of what is presently standard and popular in the city without having to search too long and hard. If I was visiting Brighton for the first time I feel as though it would give enough good advice to get me going in the city. Saying that, I still feel as though it is a service Google, Bing and Yahoo certainly offer just as well, if not considerably better.
After putting in several other search queries it does offer some good results and covers most of the bases you would expect from a search engine plus it knows when phrases can have different meanings and alerts you to this. There is a cool Icon bar where you can click on the logo of a major company’s website and it will perform the same search for you on their site and provide their results. It is interesting to see how your search query is referenced in various websites around the world. There are a few obvious misses like no RSS feeds link but hopefully this will all be rectified as time goes by with the site still being so new.
So if you want to try something different from the big guns of search then you could do worse than taking a look at Duck Duck Go. It may look as quirky as it sounds but it does offer some good information.
