(This is my old username, which I thought fit well with this post. You may know me now as yegg.)<p>I launched DuckDuckGo on HN (then Startup News) seven years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=315142 and the idea of Traction book five years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2098068. If I hadn't gotten encouragement and excitement in these threads (which I did!) then I might have quit each shortly after. So thank you for that!<p>In 2009-2010, when I was struggling to get traction for DuckDuckGo, I started doing a series of interviews on my blog with successful founders about how they got traction in an effort to uncover a structured process for doing so. Naturally, I interviewed a lot of HN greats like patio11 (Patrick McKenzie), justin (Justin Kan), garry (Garry Tan), kn0thing (Alexis Ohanian) and other startup icons like Eric Ries, Jimmy Wales, etc. Last year I put a bunch of these early interviews on YouTube if you want to check them out: https://www.youtube.com/user/tractionbook<p>If I hadn't been part of the HN community I probably wouldn't have done these interviews or the series of blog posts that led to writing Traction, which in turn led to getting traction for DuckDuckGo.<p>A lot of people on HN have used DuckDuckGo and read the book and gave excellent feedback on both, a lot of which we have acted on to make these things what they are today today. The proximate cause for thinking about this was the second edition of the book came out yesterday, and I'm in a reflective mood.<p>I'm extremely grateful for being part of this community. Ask me anything, and I'll try to help where I can.
How much traffic does the Tor hidden service for your search engine get? Would you characterize the usage as significant, or is it mainly kept up as a public service for a small number of people who use it?
I love DDG's bangs and instant answers. Do you have any statistics on their usage? Like counts of how many times a bang or an instant answer was used?<p>And will Dax play a bigger role in the future, in branding to give more personality? It wasn't easy finding the name of the duck I see daily. (<a href="https://duckduckgo.com/?q=name+of+the+duckduckgo+duck" rel="nofollow">https://duckduckgo.com/?q=name+of+the+duckduckgo+duck</a>)
Hello,<p>Congrats for your search engine. I admire the work you did. The only reason I don't use DDG is that I'm Greek and the results for Greek keywords are many orders of magnitude off-mark compared to Google. Why is that? Any hope to improve results in the future?<p>ty
Gabriel, do you plan to implement time-bound search filters on DDG? I'm probably not alone in finding it very usefull and would gladly avoid jumping back and forth between DDG and Google. Anyway, kudos for all you've done.
Are there any plans for a Google trends like analysis tool or any plans on opening up anonymous search statistics?<p>On a personal note, DDG has been my daily driver for about 2 years now. I love the bang shortcuts (!man and !cpp mostly).<p>The first few months or so, I ended up following almost every search query with a "!g query", but search results have really, really improved. Now I only have to use Google for local topics and/or very recent events.
We don't see too many Philly area firms getting attention on HN. I try to promote the area when I can (here or on Reddit). What would be your top reasons software engineers should consider the Philly tech scene as a place to work and live?
Gabriel, thank you for DDG I have been using and promoting for years.<p>In terms of mobile any plans for the future you can reveal? How do you feel about Siri, Google Now and Cortana is it something you think DDG can do or can be used as a backend/source ?
Thanks for publishing your book it has been really useful for me.<p>When you were first working on DDG who did you show it to before you "launched" on here? What kind of early feedback did you get?
Congrats and all the best with the book! Happy to participate and hope it can help get my experiences with Reddit, Hipmunk and beyond into as many people's heads as possible.
I'd just like to say thank you for making the search box the first thing that gets focus when pressing Tab.<p>Google got this one wrong (though I suspect that google does it on purpose).
Is there any chance that you guys could implement a feature like your major competitor's "scholar" search for searching academic articles?
Congratulations, Gabriel on all the success you've had so far with DDG and Traction. I was an early user of DDG and although I didn't stick around, I truly do admire you for what you stand for and your courage and perseverance to push through it.<p>I do believe that it is critical that we do have choices. Choices that can free us from a single establishment. So, thank you!
Hey Gabriel,<p>Just wanted to say thanks for DDG, it's been my default search engine for going on a year now and absolutely love it. I'm also a developer(DDG is also the reason I started to dabble with Perl) from PA (about 10 minutes from DDG) and have to say it's very exciting to see something like DuckDuckGo created in my hometown area. Thanks again for the great work!
Are you working on any new business dev for DuckDuckGo?
I feel that no-tracking is a soft value add and I imagine keyword-based targeted ads is limiting when competing with large search engines that tracks more information about the users. Which direction are you taking DuckDuckGo that further differentiates your product?
I think there is real value in consumers being able to glean value they want from their own data, would you or have you ever considered a program that allowed users to share data with you in exchange for services, ads or other products they continually found relevant?
How would you self describe the general search quality of DuckDuckGo, excluding the (brilliant) Instant Answers?<p>How do you evaluate the general search quality?<p>Do you have any focus on expanding crawling in general? And localized content in particular?
Perhaps it's completely out of reach (fiscally or ethically) but have you considered partnering with Mozilla to become Firefox's default search engine?
when will you add instant search results in the browser's search box? For example, if i use Firefox and have Google ad the default, and i type "32 * (13 - 9)" it will instantly show a dropdown with the answer 128. I would really like DDG to do this too.