Duck Duck Go is a new search engine with a focus on user experience. It “outgoogles” Google when it comes to simplicity and ease of use.

I am particularly impressed with the search results page. Navigation is intuitive and yet it holds a lot of useful tools and information.

I have talked to Gabriel Weinberg who is Founder and CEO of Duck Duck Go. He is educated at MIT and calls himself a serial entrepreneur. Before his present venture, he developed a profitable Web site, The Names Database, that was sold to Classmates.com for 10 million US dollars.

In the interview he talks about what makes Duck Duck Go different from other search engines, what he has done to eliminate spam from the search results, how the search result pages optimized for ease of use and what his business plan is.

Why yet another search engine?

Pandia: Setting out to make your very own search engine, what were your goals?

Gabriel Weinberg: The primary goal of Duck Duck Go is to give you the information you’re looking for faster and with less mental effort.

If you simply want to know what something is, the topic summaries at the very top of the search results will tell you — with zero clicks. If you are looking for official information, you get it right away because the link is labeled “Official site” and it is the top result.

And Duck Duck Go has simple, more relevant, and less spam-ridden links so you spend less time combing through results.

Our second goal is to help you find related information you might not otherwise have thought of. Duck Duck Go offers you this through links to related topics. It also has category pages that group topics with similar concepts.

It also does ambiguous keyword detection, such as asking you which meaning of “apple” you wanted. These features enable you to discover information that is relevant for your search that isn’t in regular search results.

The spam problem and a solution

Pandia: You say your search results have less spam than other search engines. How do you get rid of it?

Gabriel Weinberg:This is a two-pronged effort. First, we partnered with The Parked Domains Project, which I am also involved in.

That project regularly crawls the Web and marks spam and parked domains. At last count it was marking over 43 million pages, which depending on how you count, is approximately between 30-40% of the whole Internet!

A lot of these pages are in Google’s, Yahoo’s and other indexes even though these pages are completely useless. Duck Duck Go simply omits all these domains.

Second, we draw on human policed sources like Wikipedia, placing links from these sources (note not just to them, but from them), above algorithmically generated links.

These sources are constantly being checked and ridded of spam and so they hardly have any in them, and when they do, it is usually quickly rectified. As a result, our links are doubly controlled for spam.

Search result innovations

Pandia: Some searches on Duck Duck Go brings up links to category pages. How are these pages made and what is the added value for your users?

Gabriel Weinberg: One of the main things that makes Duck Duck Go different is we have some actual content on our pages, in addition to the regular links and snippets everyone is used to.

What we’ve done is created “Duck Duck Go Topics” to highlight this content. For example, we have an Autism Topic with some “Zero-click Info,” i.e. a topic summary and list of related topics.

We’ve also created the “Category Pages” you asked about, which group topics about similar subjects. For example, there is an Autism Category as well that links to the Autism Topic and other topics about Autism, e.g. Autism Is a World.

These lists are often long and so are too big to be useful in the related topics sections alone. When they get really big, we provide alphabet links at the top of them for easier navigation.

We’ve found that users really like these pages because they help them delve deep into topics and find out about related topics they didn’t know about before. On them, we provide a little snippet information, which is actually part of those topics’ Zero-click Info. This info helps users not have to click and back and forth a lot.

To build the Category Pages, we mine the same human powered sources, e.g. Wikipedia, Crunchbase, etc., that we use for our other content such as the Zero-click Info. For each source, there is a slightly different way of producing these category pages. Lately we’ve been working on merging Category Pages from multiple sources to make them even more useful and complete in terms of topics covered.

Pandia: Doing a test search for Apple on Duck Duck Go, I came across a disambiguation page asking me “Duck Duck Go knows Apple can mean different things. Which meaning?” How do you do the disambiguation?

Gabriel Weinberg: We believe we’ve taken disambiguation further than any other search engine by putting our Disambiguation Pages in front of actual result pages where applicable. By having the user select which topic they really want, we can show them much more relevant results based on that choice.

Similar to how we generate the Category Pages, many sources that we draw on offer forms of disambiguation in one way or another and to different extents. We’ve pieced together these human-powered disambiguation efforts and turned them into our Disambiguation Pages.

This is an ever on-going effort as one has to make sure most all topics related to the term in question are covered, as well as make sure the most common requests are at the top.

Pandia: You provide icons that will move the current search to services like YouYube, Flickr, Twitter etc. In which ways do you see this improving the search experience of your users?

Gabriel Weinberg: The “Icon Bar”, as we’re currently calling it is a user interface experiment that is going quite well, so we will probably keep it. The idea is that while YouTube results do come up via universal search, sometimes after you search you decide you really want to explore YouTube itself.

Those links give you one-click access instead of having to type in youtube.com in your search bar and re-run the search on their site.

In other words, we believe other sites’ search engines are more useful than Google or Duck Duck Go in specific circumstances. The sites in the Icon Bar are the most queried sites on the Internet beyond the general search engines.

We believe there are great use cases where it would be valuable to click on each one to either do more exploratory search on that site or delve deeper on that site, which often provides great related content.

In the future, we hope to do even more of this by helping our users be connected to the right vertical search engine if their query warrants it. For example, it is widely recognized Kayak is great for travel searching.

There are literally 100s of those great vertical search engines that do better than Google and Duck Duck Go (at least currently) in their vertical categories. As long as that is the case, I think it makes sense to help the user get there, such that they get the best possible results no matter what.

The all-important business plan

Pandia: What is your business plan? I can’t imagine a lot of Google ads cluttering your pristine pages. I imagine you get money for the traffic you send to Amazon, Target etc. from the links in the icon bar. Will this be your solution?

Gabriel Weinberg: Everything is really on the table. We certainly won’t be cluttering our pages though. However, I do think we will try some text ads at some point. There just won’t be that many of them.

We’re not currently getting money from our Icon Bar, but if we decide to keep it long-term that is certainly something we’ll look into. But I want to be clear that is not the driver of that functionality at all. Everything we do (and have done) is focused on the user.

As for licensing, we currently offer a free API. We’re open to further licensing ideas and suggestions, but haven’t focused on that at all to date.