Posts from DuckDuckGo

Feature Friday: DuckDuckHack

One of my favorite features of the DuckDuckGo search engine (a USV portfolio company) is the instant answer. The instant answer is the box at the top that gives you what you were looking for. For Fred Wilson, it looks like this:

Instant answer

So Gabe, the founder of DDG, hacked up a way for users to contribute instant answers. He calls it DuckDuckHack. And he created a Twitter account where he publishes all the Instant Answer hacks. Yesterday "mstratman" created a hack that generates QR codes. Here's the QR code for avc.com.

QR code
And this hack tells you what the currency is in a country.

Malawi
If you use DDG, then you should absolutely follow the Twitter account and get tips on cool instant answer hacks. But more than anything, this shows how Gabe is thinking about making DDG better and I like that.

#Web/Tech

Duck Duck Go Passed 1mm Searches Per Day

I'm a bit late with this news about our portfolio company Duck Duck Go but I am super excited about it so I'm posting it anyway. I'll let a tweet tell the story:

 

 

One million searches per day is not chump change. AOL does somewhere around four or five times that every day. And if you look at this public chart of Duck Duck Go's growth, you'll see that they may pass AOL sometime this year.

Ddg traffic

Why is DDG growing so fast? Well first and foremost, their product is getting better and better. I have changed all my browsers to default to DDG and I am watching the service improve before my eyes. And the redesign that launched around year end is excellent. So if you haven't tried DDG recently, you should give it a try.

But it may also be that other search engines are doing things that some users don't approve of and those users are shopping around for a new search engine. If you are in that camp, join me at DDG and see what clean, private, impartial and fast search is like.

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#VC & Technology#Web/Tech