'New' Search Enginge: DuckDuckGo.COM

[6Foot2]

I say 'New' because I doubt that it is that new but I only stumbled across it today. It could be useful for some as it seems to have an inbuilt filter which tries to eliminate unsafe search results.

 

I just tried several searches I knew would give 'unsatisfactory' results, even behind our firewall provided by our ISP, and it returned:

 

'No safe search results'

 

I think it might be a bit limiting for the more advanced user though: You don't know what results are not being shown and what the criteria for not showing them are.

 

Link: Search Engine Duck Duck Go

[yegg]

Hi, I'm the founder of Duck Duck Go. Thanks for checking us out! I'm happy to answer any questions you or anyone else may have. But more than that, I'm interested in making the search engine better suited for educators like yourself. For more info about us, check out our About page, which also links to an FAQ and other stuff.

 

You've hit on one thing we've tried to do to appeal to educators, which is a very good safe search. In addition to removing "unsafe" results, it also removes a lot more parked/spam pages that you'll find in the other search engines.

 

In answer to your question about limitations, it really shouldn't be that limiting. We have our own index and crawler, but also use Yahoo & Bing APIs to fill in the gaps of the pages that may not be in our index. And then we run those through our safe filter in real time so that you end up with the safe results from all angles.

 

Another primary feature that I think will appeal to you is our Zero-click Info boxes. For many searches, we provide definitions, explanations and related topic summaries on the page, i.e. with zero-clicks. This is good for students doing research and generally exploring topics/learning.

 

Anyway, I'd love to have an open dialog about what I can do to improve from your perspective. So don't hold back--I'm all ears!

[6Foot2]

Hi and welcome to Edugeek. I am sure that you will get plenty of feedback here.

 

I am sure that one of the things that will be requested here is access to an image search, while still keeping undesirable results out. Do you have any plans to deploy this?

Edited March 8, 2010 by 6Foot2
Correct spelling/formatting error.

[glennda]

personally i think it should be called Duck Duck Goose

 

But seriously i think a search engine with filtered images would be a great thing for education

 

Toby

[yegg]

It is an oft requested feature, perhaps the most. So it has been on my mind a lot. At the moment you can get taken to Google images via the !images search keyword. Having done no investigation yet myself on how good their image safe search is, I'm not sure how useful this procedure will be for you.

 

Honestly, image search is difficult and getting a good safe search for images even more so. We've been so focused on results that I'm not sure when we'll get our own bottom-up image search. What we've been thinking about doing is integrating Yahoo and/or Bings and then overlaying our safe search algos on top.

 

Note that we do show one image on a lot of searches via our Zero-click Info boxes.

[EduTech]

This could be very usful, what i am finding recently is that students are spending most of there time in lessons finding games, proxys etc via google and now they have also found out about the "cached" part of google they are starting to display inappropriate content.

 

Search Engine Duck Duck Go < just done a few searches with this and although i cant say for definite i think it could be a education friendly search engine that would allow us to block bing, google etc and therefore maybe prevent the games,proxys, inappropriate images etc

 

we already block the mail side of these sites in college to force staff/students to use college internal email system.

 

Nice Find!

 

James.

[6Foot2]

...What we've been thinking about doing is integrating Yahoo and/or Bings and then overlaying our safe search algos on top...

 

Speaking from personal experience if you want widespread adoption in the education sector do not align yourself with Bing: Our ISP blocks lots of Bing pages purely because they are Bing pages. They have been assessed as returning more results which are undesirable than other search engines. This may change but I doubt it will be any-time soon.

Edited March 8, 2010 by 6Foot2
Change grammar in post.

[yegg]

Thanks for the tip on Bing. Right now it is just a backup for Yahoo that really never gets used. I thought if I went to images, maps etc. I'd see what their latest APIs are like, but if they are bad I will definitely stay away. Note that regardless, our stuff will always be on top and we will be heavily editing whatever they send us, i.e. omitting, re-ordering, etc.

[tom_newton]

Hey yegg. Would you mind talking to one of our filtering specialists, make sure we do right by your site? (I have already mailed this thread to Nile Clarke, who's "the man" for this type of thing)

 

[edit: THREAD not threat... thanks DaveP for a bit of proofreading... less glenlivet for you newton)

 

We like to be able to force safe search, and filter query terms where appropriate.

 

FWIW: GIS probably has the best image safesearch of any - not fool proof, I googled "fun stuff" and got a pic of a lady with unfeasibly large.. . No nudity though to be fair. Bing., on the other hand win top spot for their API, which is pure silk.

 

Oh yeah -and welcome to Edugeek

Edited March 8, 2010 by tom_newton

[yegg]

tom_newton, sure, I'd be happy to talk to anyone. We've been thinking of a feature (and done some experiments) where you could force (lock) safe search by IP. So if you had a school all on one IP, we would force that on our end and you wouldn't have to do anything else on your end. Let me know if you think this is useful.

[glennda]

tom_newton, sure, I'd be happy to talk to anyone. We've been thinking of a feature (and done some experiments) where you could force (lock) safe search by IP. So if you had a school all on one IP, we would force that on our end and you wouldn't have to do anything else on your end. Let me know if you think this is useful.

 

this would be quite handy - i know 99% of the school computers in my local authority all go out via the same IP.

[tom_newton]

tom_newton, sure, I'd be happy to talk to anyone. We've been thinking of a feature (and done some experiments) where you could force (lock) safe search by IP. So if you had a school all on one IP, we would force that on our end and you wouldn't have to do anything else on your end. Let me know if you think this is useful.

 

Useful for certain organisations certainly!

 

What we like (in terms of easy to do!) is if we can append a query parameter to every query, eg "&safe=strict" and it overrides other controls. Some sites like to make it hard by going bang if you add the parameter to the wrong urls, or constantly thrashing around in a rewrite loop.

 

Ooh - Nile has just mailed to say he'd been in touch a few months ago and you are cookie based. Makes it slightly harder, still doable generally. I'll let Nile get back in touch see if theres anything else to cover.

[ahuxham]

Very nice indeed. I like the layout and styling, however I don't really like the on-demand ajax style loading of search results as you scroll down, pretty annoying.

 

More feedback incoming.