Ack. Good results but not yet so impressive that it's a Google killer. I gave it a quick spin and it gave better results than most prospective giant killers, but still not notably better than the giant itself.
Unlike most, I'd be prepared to give it another go at some future date though - so this definitely has some potential. I hope the developer keeps on working on this.
I like the ajax loading. Internet marketing types will like the ability to see the first X pages all on one page without having to set some parameter (as in google)
Yes, the ajax loading is much less intrusive than loading a new page. It makes it far easier to search through the existing results. It needs one or two UI changes:
1) When you click 'more results' add a divider before the first new result to make it clear which new results just appeared. In most cases the first new link will already be highlighted since the mouse will be hovering overy it but any antsy mouser will not have this benefit.
Also, I notice that I have the tendency (and need) to move the mouse off the first new link so I can read it. This is very inefficient so it would best to append the new results one line below the 'more links' link.
2) Consider adding an auto-scroll to put the first new result at the top or middle of the page to reduce scrolling. This may be disruptive, however.
I like the idea, but I agree that the implementation isn't perfect. I would say the solution isn't to drop the [load more results] thing in favor of pagination, but to improve it.
I can't explain exactly why it is annoying as currently implemented, but it is. Somehow, the more results thing needs to be more "fluid". Maybe make the interface more like regular pagination, but just add the results to the bottom of the same page?
The ajax loading is good, but instead of having to click, let it auto load as they scroll down to get the "infinite search results" effect. Also the large amount of whitespace at the bottom is annoying.
pretty cool, seems to use wikipedia to seem semantic... which works most of the time. I just don't see how its possible to break into google's market share or for that sake, Yahoo's or MSN's ...
- I think companies like octopart, that are doing segmented search have a better chance.
I am using Yahoo BOSS as fallback. That message comes up when Yahoo BOSS times out (i.e. double fallback), which unfortunately happens more than it should.
Duck Duck Google is a remnant of earlier functionality that is currently not live. You're right, Google' is simpler than 'Duck Duck Google'.
Wow, I really like the results, especially the 'see also' section.
(Give a search for "pearl" a go for a good example.)
More focused searches also worked well ("javascript array split" got me the result I wanted).
I also liked the fall back to google domain specific search for "javascript aray split w3schools" although I'm not sure I understand exactly what made it do that.
The result layout needs some work, mostly to make long results easier to scan, but I will probably carry on using this provided I can remember the URL.
Quite simply, I looked at the current state of search and saw a path through which I could add something useful to the space.
There are all sorts of issues with current search, most of which have been discussed on this forum elsewhere. Relevancy is certainly one of them, but there are others too, e.g. spam, clutter, discovery, and UI.
I did something similar with Yahoo! BOSS APIs but I used terminal-liked console as the UI. Sometimes, I really think that it will be more useful for hackers to use a Terminal-liked search engine - http://geeky.siong1987.com. It is a bit slow because the whole application is not well-architectured. I sacrificed too much speed power for the developer feature.
About your application, I think the name of the search engine is really awkward. And, the logo is really too colorful. It seems like a side-project more than a serious project. Anyway, it displayed the results that I expected.
you're not catastrophically bad or slow, unlike some others that have shown up lately. good work on avoiding negative points right off the bat.
if the first page doesn't have what i want, i find myself confused as to what my next course of action should be.
my first reaction to all the ajax stuff is "hey, thats kind of cool" my second reaction is "my expections about what should happen when i move my mouse (mostly nothing) are being violated! help!"
in summary: i think you need to do some real usability studies.
The name consists of three stressed syllables, which is hard to say fluidly. You can't turn it into a verb, like "google". This may cause problems with marketability. I am being totally serious.
I liked it, I think it has very impressive functionality; I think you won't have a problem selling it to some company. The search market is huge and doesn't end at Google.
Highly relevant results for the band I entered, but not enough to make me want to switch from Google.
It's not that you aren't good, it's just that you aren't great- there's nothing here that would make me want to purposefully break a habit formed over the past seven odd years. Namely, using Google.
I wonder if search has become a commodity, and the reason why Google dominates isn't because of its search engine, it's because of its brand name. Search actually seems a lot like the food industry in that you can't really judge the quality of the product beyond a certain level, yet you care deeply about that quality. Those industries usually tend to become branding plays, not technology plays.
Google's brand does influence its search results. I recall the MSN Live team put the Google logo above their results and people automatically perceived them as more relevant even though the results had not changed.
My random query for "tears of a clown" worked well. How tied is this to the internet? There might be a market in the Enterprise search world if you are managing the index.
Pretty impressive results for the terms I searched for. Unfortunately, the design made me temporarily go blind.
In all seriousness, the name is pretty horrible and I "feel" as if I am using a website, not a tool. Google feels like a tool - I get in an out quickly, it doesn't invade my flow. Your application (and others, like Mahalo) are so visually invasive I would never use them, no matter the results that we returned.
Not really a design thing - although it stems from the design - more like a workflow thing... I dunno, hard to describe.
Thanks for the feedback. I would very much like it to be a "tool" as you describe. I've gone through many design iterations, and have tried to keep the "clutter" down to a minimum.
I would be interested to know what specific design elements you think are contributing to this problem. I know you said it isn't really a design problem, but there has to be more to say about it :) Colors? The results on the right?
The huge font size is reminiscent of text intended for small children, which combined with the colorful logo makes the site look childish in my eyes. It's furthermore bigger than most text on the web, which makes it paradoxically harder to read for me. Flashy stuff tends to catch the attention of young people, but it tends to be tiring past a certain age (I'm 29). It also reduces information density, but this may be intentional.
That said, the results are very good, the classification by topic well done, and the small descriptions are a good alternative to the usual SERP extracts. I had troubles with queries typed in French (It turned mostly results in English), but I assume you're focusing on the English language at the moment.
Besides, the layout is clean and unobtrusive. I agree with axod and aroxwell regarding caching (one "batch" of results ahead should be enough)and pagination, and with ambulatorybird regarding the length and lack of fluidity of the name. At least one these characteristics should be dropped.
For me, the highlight-and-underline-on-hover effect is very distracting. It would be nice if the search entry field had a stronger visual separation from the search results. There also needs to be a stronger visual separation between each search result. This might just be that I'm so heavily conditioned by Google, but I'm thrown off by the results being so far from the left edge of the screen. Also, the red, it's a little harsh, and the font size, it's a little big.
Otherwise, though, just playing around, this seems like a really nice search engine, the results seem great. If I didn't think it had a lot of promise, I wouldn't have posted a critique.
Regarding the "highlight-and-underline-on-hover effect", I liked that. It is really nice that the whole text area works as a link, clicking on a hit is easier. And the highlight, well, highlights that.
I think the font size is the most obtrusive to begin with - it's just insanely huge. I'm a Web 2.0 fan as much as the next guy and think most websites use a font size that is to small but... ouch.
I think that would be a good place to start - once you do that you may find that the mouseovers are distracting or jump around way to much now that your line-heights are smaller. Jury seems to be out on those, personally I'm not a fan but enough people said they do like them that it's a questionable change.
I think limiting the use of mouseovers could be valuable. By making off-site links (the actual SERPs) not have a mouseover while making in-site links (narrowing of categories, the more... link to activate BOSS, etc) could offer a subconcious identifier to your users as to what the next action will actually do.
I agree with you. I really like it. Worked well for me. I'm also incredibly impressed with the results. Is this a search engine grown from the ground up with its own crawler or is it using an existing dataset? If self-created this must be worth something right now
Ahh, ok - I was completely blown away by what looked like a 1-man creation :) Indeed, I still think its great for one person to have done this. Gonna look at Yahoo! Boss now. Thanks for this
Duck Duck Go's site says it was in development for about a year. If it was indeed built on top of BOSS, the developer must've spent 10 months doing pretty much nothing.
I agree about the name, but at the same time, DogPile was able to be successful for a time (maybe they still are? I have no idea) with what is arguably a worse name.
I'm actually pretty impressed. Searched for "Epigram" first and it came up with the programming language as the first result, along with Conor's homepage. Searched for "Arya Stark" and it came up with the Westeros fan wiki and Wikipedia entry. Searched for Hacker News, and the site was the first hit. Searched for my name (a tough one, since lots of people share it), and came up with my FriendFeed page, Write Yourself a Scheme in 48 Hours, and a support question I left on the webfaction forum.
Couple comments:
What's with the Wink and PeopleFinder links? Partnerships? They're almost never what I want, and putting them up top is distracting.
The AJAX-load-more-results-on-scroll feature is cool, but I found it a little jerky and distracting. This could be because just hold down the down arrow, so I go really fast and often hit the end of the page while it's loading. Any way to make the transition a little smoother, maybe by preloading results and only displaying them as you scroll, maybe by a fade or slide transition?
I definitely agree that the results should be more structured. Also the page should be aligned left because that's what people are used to. Maybe something like this: http://pixtures.s3.amazonaws.com/duck.jpg
The search button is way too big. The text is too big. Shrink everything and fit more information on one page.
Maybe include some "Web links" on every page. Then right align the "More topics" and "More Web links" to the right so people know they're not ordinary links, but instead offer additional functionality.
Overall, I really like it. It looks like you lift a lot of information and links from wikipedia. I think this is a great idea.
It's annoying. My train of thought when I got there:
Good, clean simple interface. Funny name.
This text box is huge. I don't know if that's good or bad
Everythings scrunched up at the top. I have plenty of vertical room, use it.
I'll search for something... alright why is there a loading bar for a search engine?
This is frusturating having to wait for my results
What? Only 4?
This 'load more results' thing is fairly annoying, just load them for me
I'll try something else... say 'blue wallpaper'
*Oh how handy, I'm at Google now.
I like the fact that results are returned by relevance and categorization. However, the lack of visual cues between categories is rather harsh to follow. I think if you were to have a sightly grey background for each category with whitespace between, things would be much easier to look at and comprehend. Otherwise, the results were, for the most part, great.
I like how it breaks down into categories, eg. 'django' gives the person, web (py framework), etc, but don't like the large fonts, need to scroll down quite a bit to see all results.
Cool (i like the fact that when i searched for duckduckgo the first result was "awesome search engine"). I also searched for google (and it gave me cool results such as it's use as a verb). It worked for technical questions such as NullPointerException and sigsegv so overall it's very cool.Congrats! [Perhaps building an add-on for word and office suites would be great for this type of search engine, i would like it(because of things like what i got out of the google query]
very impressed, tried a variety of search terms and got not only what I was expecting but also other hits that were keyword equivalent. ok fair enough it's a little less responsive than google ;o) but I'm guessing you don't have a spare $50 billion to play with! (jk - the speed is fine btw). The thing that needs most attention (imho) is the design, whilst there are good things (the layout of the search results, especially of 'wide' keywords like 'ruby' or 'augustus') I'm less of a fan of the use of red - in design terms red is an emotive, passionate colour, I would recommend perhaps a blue which usually represents safety, security and trust (look at bank colour schemes). You might alos consider green or grey. The red sets me on edge. Love the use of larger fonts sizes, excellent - should be popular with the age > 25 crowd.
All in all very impressed, I wish you the very best of luck and have bookmarked and will continue to use. (Remember to keep Hacker News updated with any new developments!).
143 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 177 ms ] threadpretty interesting functionality - i like how vague searches ask for categorization. i searched a band name and got specific info and links.
but most searches produce way too little broad results.
interesting but needs more work i'd say.
Unlike most, I'd be prepared to give it another go at some future date though - so this definitely has some potential. I hope the developer keeps on working on this.
Seems to give some good results back in a useful way.
1) When you click 'more results' add a divider before the first new result to make it clear which new results just appeared. In most cases the first new link will already be highlighted since the mouse will be hovering overy it but any antsy mouser will not have this benefit.
Also, I notice that I have the tendency (and need) to move the mouse off the first new link so I can read it. This is very inefficient so it would best to append the new results one line below the 'more links' link.
2) Consider adding an auto-scroll to put the first new result at the top or middle of the page to reduce scrolling. This may be disruptive, however.
I can't explain exactly why it is annoying as currently implemented, but it is. Somehow, the more results thing needs to be more "fluid". Maybe make the interface more like regular pagination, but just add the results to the bottom of the same page?
Would love to know more, like if you do crawl everything yourself... :)
- I think companies like octopart, that are doing segmented search have a better chance.
I found that confusing. Just say Google. Also you could use Yahoo BOSS to pull in results when you dont have any (if thats allowed)
Duck Duck Google is a remnant of earlier functionality that is currently not live. You're right, Google' is simpler than 'Duck Duck Google'.
(Give a search for "pearl" a go for a good example.)
More focused searches also worked well ("javascript array split" got me the result I wanted).
I also liked the fall back to google domain specific search for "javascript aray split w3schools" although I'm not sure I understand exactly what made it do that.
The result layout needs some work, mostly to make long results easier to scan, but I will probably carry on using this provided I can remember the URL.
There are all sorts of issues with current search, most of which have been discussed on this forum elsewhere. Relevancy is certainly one of them, but there are others too, e.g. spam, clutter, discovery, and UI.
About your application, I think the name of the search engine is really awkward. And, the logo is really too colorful. It seems like a side-project more than a serious project. Anyway, it displayed the results that I expected.
if the first page doesn't have what i want, i find myself confused as to what my next course of action should be.
my first reaction to all the ajax stuff is "hey, thats kind of cool" my second reaction is "my expections about what should happen when i move my mouse (mostly nothing) are being violated! help!"
in summary: i think you need to do some real usability studies.
It's not that you aren't good, it's just that you aren't great- there's nothing here that would make me want to purposefully break a habit formed over the past seven odd years. Namely, using Google.
After much Googling the closest I could come to finding the article was here (at the bottom): http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/3601751
In all seriousness, the name is pretty horrible and I "feel" as if I am using a website, not a tool. Google feels like a tool - I get in an out quickly, it doesn't invade my flow. Your application (and others, like Mahalo) are so visually invasive I would never use them, no matter the results that we returned.
Not really a design thing - although it stems from the design - more like a workflow thing... I dunno, hard to describe.
I would be interested to know what specific design elements you think are contributing to this problem. I know you said it isn't really a design problem, but there has to be more to say about it :) Colors? The results on the right?
That said, the results are very good, the classification by topic well done, and the small descriptions are a good alternative to the usual SERP extracts. I had troubles with queries typed in French (It turned mostly results in English), but I assume you're focusing on the English language at the moment.
Besides, the layout is clean and unobtrusive. I agree with axod and aroxwell regarding caching (one "batch" of results ahead should be enough)and pagination, and with ambulatorybird regarding the length and lack of fluidity of the name. At least one these characteristics should be dropped.
Edit: rearranged stuff.
Otherwise, though, just playing around, this seems like a really nice search engine, the results seem great. If I didn't think it had a lot of promise, I wouldn't have posted a critique.
Works for me.
I think that would be a good place to start - once you do that you may find that the mouseovers are distracting or jump around way to much now that your line-heights are smaller. Jury seems to be out on those, personally I'm not a fan but enough people said they do like them that it's a questionable change.
I think limiting the use of mouseovers could be valuable. By making off-site links (the actual SERPs) not have a mouseover while making in-site links (narrowing of categories, the more... link to activate BOSS, etc) could offer a subconcious identifier to your users as to what the next action will actually do.
Duck Duck Go's site says it was in development for about a year. If it was indeed built on top of BOSS, the developer must've spent 10 months doing pretty much nothing.
Couple comments:
What's with the Wink and PeopleFinder links? Partnerships? They're almost never what I want, and putting them up top is distracting.
The AJAX-load-more-results-on-scroll feature is cool, but I found it a little jerky and distracting. This could be because just hold down the down arrow, so I go really fast and often hit the end of the page while it's loading. Any way to make the transition a little smoother, maybe by preloading results and only displaying them as you scroll, maybe by a fade or slide transition?
In all seriousness, I like the way you're going, but I didn't like the way the results are laid out - it just looked sloppy to me.
The search button is way too big. The text is too big. Shrink everything and fit more information on one page.
Maybe include some "Web links" on every page. Then right align the "More topics" and "More Web links" to the right so people know they're not ordinary links, but instead offer additional functionality.
Overall, I really like it. It looks like you lift a lot of information and links from wikipedia. I think this is a great idea.
All in all very impressed, I wish you the very best of luck and have bookmarked and will continue to use. (Remember to keep Hacker News updated with any new developments!).