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.
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?
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How do you keep the DuckDuckGo afloat ?
But I'd like to think that if you could find a way other than ads, you'd take it in a heartbeat, even if you made less profit, but as long as you could be self-sustaining. Is that true?
I have a very strong opinion about advertising and its effects on the web. I would love to hear your feedback on them:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7485773
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10047706
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9961025
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)
Dax, yes! We're going through internal branding strategy right now and your comment is very welcome in that context.
There is a recent PEW study showing that 40% of people would prefer a no-tracking search experience. And yet a very small percentage of people have ever heard of DuckDuckGo. As a result, we think we have a lot of room to focus on making the product better and growing, and that is really our future plans in a nutshell.
In hindsight, there are always activities you realize now were a waste of time, and it is easy to say you wouldn't do them now, but in the moment it is much harder. So in general, what I've been trying to work on is making sure we're always working on the right projects, and scoping them right, given the information we have in front of us. I would have liked to be better at that earlier, but in general I wouldn't have done that much differently.
Cheaper -- you can bootstrap really easily here compared to other places even nearby (DC, NYC, BOS).
Community -- it is really a nice community where you can really reach anyone really quickly and they're willing to help.
Would you add anything?
I'll second community as well. Really helpful and approachable people in the startup community of Philly. I've never spoken to you, but have read that you are among the most approachable in the area.
I might add the available feeder system of colleges in the region - Penn being obvious, but some less obvious schools like Lehigh and Villanova that Philly firms can tap for talent. Unfortunately those students often leave Philly, but as they get more options to say they will do so.
I think the area is still in need of one or two big name companies to keep talent in the area. A larger dev satellite office of a Google/FB or even Netflix type would help keep those grads in the area after graduation, and at some point they may have grown deeper roots (families, kids in school) that might keep them in the area. I'm starting to see more and more local engineers moving west, as they feel they are "outgrowing" the area. I think a company with a good employer brand (as it relates to software) would come in and be able to hire a ton of great talent.
Thanks for answering, and best to your continued success.
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 ?
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?
I blogged all of them on Hacker News (you can search the archives to see), and then started blogging ideas that would become the book and got feedback from those on my blog and on HN.
This was all before really writing. Once we actually started writing we recruited "early readers" periodically to read and give feedback up until we had a full draft more ready to go, in which case we hit up our whole list and got another round of fresh-eyes feedback.
I think more generally you're right privacy is about control and choice, as I tried to explain in https://medium.com/life-learning/privacy-is-at-a-crossroads-...
That said, I'd also love to see a google apps like product from DDG that could really compete but promise not to sell my company's info or use it for useless ads and general spam
Do you have some plans to open source the search engine of DuckDuckGo one day and let people contribute?
Second, the sections we added were a preface about my struggles with getting traction and a testing addendum giving 1-3 suggestions of how to test each of the nineteen channels (something people continually requested).
Third and finally, I really focused on rewriting the five introductory chapters to focus on things I saw readers of the first edition struggle with. We simplified the framework from 5 to 3 steps, and tried to shed light on the more non-intuitive aspects (like don't prematurely optimize marketing tests, etc.).
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!
We think partnering with thousands of the best sites on the Web with great answers in all niche categories (lego parts, municipal bonds, anything) is a win-win-win for everyone (us, partners, users). Right now anyone can suggest an instant answer source, and anyone can develop it. The answers themselves and the entire platform is open source.
How do you evaluate the general search quality?
Do you have any focus on expanding crawling in general? And localized content in particular?
Of course, basic link quality is still par for the course. We have worked a lot this year on better language support so if you type say in Finnish we recognize that and adjust the results appropriately. For truly localized stuff (like restaurants, transit, for example), we really want to attack that via the instant answers.
Snowden accelerated our growth by years and we are really grateful for that. However, I believe we were already a success and I was happy with where we had gotten before then.
There are still no good limits on online tracking and as a result it continues to get crazier and crazier and more people are reacting. It was already heading in that direction pre-Snowden. For example, in 2012, a year and half before, we saw a huge uptick when Google changed their privacy policy to allow tracking across all their properties. And a year before that, we saw another huge uptick when we did a privacy-focused billboard and microsite (http://donttrack.us/).
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.
Google got this one wrong (though I suspect that google does it on purpose).
I do believe that it is critical that we do have choices. Choices that can free us from a single establishment. So, thank you!
Where did the name for DuckDuckGo come from?