by epi0Bauqu on 10/7/15, 2:40 PM with 80 comments
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!
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
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.
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.
I'm extremely grateful for being part of this community. Ask me anything, and I'll try to help where I can.
by Torgo on 10/7/15, 5:08 PM
by rahiel on 10/7/15, 7:55 PM
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. (https://duckduckgo.com/?q=name+of+the+duckduckgo+duck)
by atmosx on 10/7/15, 8:29 PM
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?
ty
by kawera on 10/7/15, 6:55 PM
by sspiff on 10/8/15, 3:59 PM
On a personal note, DDG has been my daily driver for about 2 years now. I love the bang shortcuts (!man and !cpp mostly).
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.
by yyz_rush on 10/7/15, 2:46 PM
by mackwic on 10/7/15, 3:01 PM
How do you keep the DuckDuckGo afloat ?
by fecak on 10/7/15, 7:20 PM
by lmedinas on 10/7/15, 7:59 PM
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 ?
by calpaterson on 10/7/15, 8:03 PM
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?
by huangc10 on 10/7/15, 6:48 PM
by alexis on 10/7/15, 8:49 PM
by Nononce on 10/8/15, 10:18 AM
Google got this one wrong (though I suspect that google does it on purpose).
by JupiterMoon on 10/7/15, 7:57 PM
by acconrad on 10/7/15, 6:51 PM
by tixocloud on 10/9/15, 3:03 PM
I do believe that it is critical that we do have choices. Choices that can free us from a single establishment. So, thank you!
by dontscale on 10/7/15, 2:59 PM
by djd3141 on 10/7/15, 6:23 PM
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!
by jihip on 10/7/15, 3:31 PM
by zbruhnke on 10/7/15, 6:45 PM
by ersii on 10/7/15, 7:05 PM
How do you evaluate the general search quality?
Do you have any focus on expanding crawling in general? And localized content in particular?
by malnourish on 10/7/15, 8:09 PM
by AdmiralAsshat on 10/7/15, 4:10 PM
by avinassh on 10/11/15, 12:07 PM
by donrhummy on 10/8/15, 5:10 PM
by S4M on 10/7/15, 5:24 PM
Do you have some plans to open source the search engine of DuckDuckGo one day and let people contribute?
by siquick on 10/7/15, 10:06 PM
Where did the name for DuckDuckGo come from?
by aunty_helen on 10/7/15, 7:27 PM
by ryanjmo on 10/8/15, 12:18 AM
by discreditable on 10/8/15, 2:53 PM
by bradnickel on 10/8/15, 2:52 AM