2/15/12

A 2001 Quote From Sergey Brin Explains DuckDuckGo's Popularity



Since its inception in 1998, Google has a come a long way from being a hot new start-up to the multi-national corporation it is now. It has sustained its dominance in the search industry by defending itself against old and new foes alike. However, recently a new search engine called DuckDuckGo has been gaining buzz around the web. 

I tried out this new service and found that I preferred it to Google, and couldn't quite put my finger on why. So, I decided to dig into what made Google so popular in the first place. I stumbled into this quote from an interview in Linux Gazette from 2001:

"Sergey Brin: Google offers users better quality search results, a simple, easy-to-use interface, high performance, and an exclusive focus on just being a search engine. We also offer cool features like caches pages, stock quotes, news headlines, links to online maps."

Interview in Linux Gazette: http://linuxgazette.net/issue59/correa.html

This basically says it all. 

Of the two screen shots below, which do you think offers a simple, easy-to-use interface, and has exclusive focus on search?

The performance and quality differences are arguable, but I haven't noticed a huge difference. DuckDuckGo may even have a quality advantage. Not to mention Google’s recent issue with embedding Google+ results alongside regular results.

Tell me what you think in the comments.






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7 Response to A 2001 Quote From Sergey Brin Explains DuckDuckGo's Popularity

February 15, 2012 at 10:01 AM

Both of your sidebar links are broken!

February 15, 2012 at 10:08 AM

thanks for the heads up, fixed it. Also that explains a lot.

February 15, 2012 at 10:14 AM

Some of the duck duck go search results are not as good as google's. However, since I discovered that you can put !g before your search to redirect to google I had no problem making the switch.

February 15, 2012 at 10:14 AM

Some of the duck duck go search results are not as good as google's. However, since I discovered that you can put !g before your search to redirect to google I had no problem making the switch.

Anonymous
February 15, 2012 at 11:23 AM

Of course the fact that duckduckgo isn't spying on your every action might have something to do with it...

Anonymous
February 15, 2012 at 1:26 PM

Google was perfect until they released the new Caffeine index in June 2010. After release search relevancy significantly dropped in quality (while ad sales profits went up). Since then it was just getting worse. I finally switched when they introduced instant search - results quality on ddg matched google's level and was good enough to satisfy my needs. Search engine must perform basic functions: search instead of trying to sell me platinum sponsor's ads.
Also I switched to paid mail account after latest privacy policy changes - Gmail man getting more annoying and intrusive.

Anonymous
February 17, 2012 at 1:16 AM

I find myself using DDG too. It's better than Bing and Yahoo and whatever. It's sometimes a bit unpredictable, but the interface is great, and it offers some cute features Google doesn't have. E.g. the "official website" can be pretty useful.

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