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."
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.
Posts
7 Response to A 2001 Quote From Sergey Brin Explains DuckDuckGo's Popularity
Both of your sidebar links are broken!
thanks for the heads up, fixed it. Also that explains a lot.
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.
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.
Of course the fact that duckduckgo isn't spying on your every action might have something to do with it...
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.
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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