Aaron Schiff » Internet economics http://aaronschiff.net Sun, 29 Jan 2012 05:07:33 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 A week with DuckDuckGo http://aaronschiff.net/2012/01/a-week-with-duckduckgo/ http://aaronschiff.net/2012/01/a-week-with-duckduckgo/#comments Sun, 29 Jan 2012 05:07:33 +0000 aaron http://aaronschiff.net/?p=148 I set my default search engine to DuckDuckGo, to give it a proper test. Having used it for a week, I feel a bit like the first time I installed Linux on my computer – It felt good to give Microsoft the finger, but frustrating and rough around the edges.

I like that DDG doesn’t track you and doesn’t try to filter search results according to what it thinks you are interested in. But many times when I couldn’t find what I was looking for on DDG’s first page of results, I tried the same search on Google with more success.

Part of the problem is that DDG doesn’t appear to have anything beyond a basic web search yet. It doesn’t search news, doesn’t seem to search blogs very well, and doesn’t have image search. It will need all of these things to compete properly with Google.

The other thing about DDG is that it’s just a little slow. Searches that are more or less instant on Google take several noticeable seconds on DDG. While it doesn’t seem like a lot, somehow it increases my perceived cost of searching significantly, and makes searching feel like a chore.

]]> http://aaronschiff.net/2012/01/a-week-with-duckduckgo/feed/ 0 Urbanized http://aaronschiff.net/2011/12/urbanized/ http://aaronschiff.net/2011/12/urbanized/#comments Wed, 07 Dec 2011 06:36:08 +0000 aaron http://aaronschiff.net/?p=57 The new film by Gary Hustwit (of Helvetica fame) is available to rent for watching online. You can get it through iTunes, or use the player below to rent it from Distrify. The Distrify business model is interesting, if you watch the video through an embedded player, the host site gets a cut of the revenues. I wonder if Vimeo and YouTube will adopt this model too or just stick with their subscriptions / ads models.

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