Congrats on the funding, and looking forward to see which directions you take Duck Duck Go next! I think DDG is a great example that there's still lots of room for different approaches and philosophies in the search space.
For me, the killer Google lockin is autocomplete-with-suggest in Chrome.<p>I've come to completely rely on Google suggest as I type search queries into my Chrome address bar.<p>I find that particularly when looking up API calls, I don't even need to execute a search, I just need to rely on the wisdom of what everyone else on the Internet is searching for.<p>Also, if just looking for the domain name for a company, you don't have to execute a search, just start typing the company name. That skips the whole results page, saving precious seconds hundreds of times per day.<p>I just tried switching to DDG and lasted all of 5 minutes because the lack of autocomplete.
I'm just trying to understand this move.. DDG has been running with ~1 dev for 3 years.. I know that they were adding a second dev, but why raise capital? I don't see what this gets them, over continuing as a lifestyle bus.
Love what Gabriel's doing with DDG.<p>Assuming Apple maintains its policy of only allowing the Big 3 (Google, Bing, Yahoo) as default search engines in iOS, anyone know a way to manually add custom search engines?<p>I know DDG has an app, but it's not an ideal solution for everyday use.
I'm very pleased for Duck Duck Go. Lots of things about Google are frustrating, and it's great to have an alternative.<p>They're not quite there, but I hope they manage it soon.
I tried Duck Duck Go a bit today, switching it as my default search engine for chrome. I liked the search results, they definitely seemed better -- but the major feature it lacked was being able to get instant results right in the search bar.<p>I do a lot of on the fly math in the search bar because of my job and Duck Duck Go just totally disrupts my work flow for that, so I ended up switching back to Google after the day was over.
I'd like to see more search engines come into the picture, but from using this, I'm not sure I understand how the results are more relevant than what Google provides.
If you type in the name of someone well known, you get a box with some info about them - mostly from wikipedia,but couple of other sources. If you are relatively unknown, the results are the typical linkedin, spoke.com, myliving, etc. etc.<p>For someone to really switch over from Google, the results cannot be as good as. Bing was as good as, and it hasn't really worked out so well for them. With as good as - there's no compelling reason to switch. It has to be substantially better, and I don't see it but I could be completely wrong.
I'd be happy for someone to reply to this with example search terms where the results from DDG are far better than what Google provides.
This is great news! I have tried to wean myself from the Google teat several times over the past couple of years without success. DDG has been the one that has gotten me closest and with the latest Google focus stealing madness I'm giving it another go.<p>I just performed a search on DDG and I can use my keyboard arrow keys in a sane manor again. So far, so good!
If you switch to DDG but still wonder what G might have shown as a result, here's a little extension for Chrome that will show G's results (disclaimer: I'm the author).
<a href="http://raivoratsep.com/177/duckduckgo-transition-assistant/" rel="nofollow">http://raivoratsep.com/177/duckduckgo-transition-assistant/</a>
Gabriel is perhaps the most principled, friendly, fast thinking entrepreneur in tech today. Awesome to see this investment and, as a DDG user, excited to see how the team will take it to the next level.
Is DDG still just one person? I assume he'll be building a bigger team then right?<p>Very cool that this is the Philly area, hopefully he doesn't move elsewhere.
I know there's a lot involved with changing but I recommend not necessarily a change of the brand DuckDuckGo but the domain name. It really ... seriously and I am not exaggerating, it's DuckDuckGo.com is unbearably uncomfortable to type. Now that you have funding, considering getting DDG.com or duckgg.com or something.. just not the full name.<p>FYI. Google.com is really easy to type.<p>Update: Thanks for pointing out ddg.gg
The funny thing is that DuckDuckGo will at some point have to ditch their "Carbon Ads" in favor of Google's Paid Ad Feed. Basically, DDG will become a super affiliate of Google.