08 September 2012

DuckDuckGo Sugar and Gold

Just in case you don't know, there's a search engine called Duck Duck Go (apologies to Gabriel and team if the spelling is incorrect!). I've been using it for a while now and even had a rap with the founder Gabriel Weinberg about this time last year (my Ph.D. thesis was on search engine usability).

One reason I liked it enormously was that it returned results with a very high precision. In search engine terms, this means that there were few non-relevant results. The other core measure is recall which is the number of sites returned and a third measure, accuracy, which is a function of recall and precision. This gave me quite a cheer.

The second reason I liked it is that my own personal sites do well in ranking: Searching for 'freelance user experience researcher' shows alansalmoni.com as number 1!

But something else happened that makes me want to spread the love. I was rushing up a design for a new resume (a cross between the traditional resume and an infographic - I have no idea if it will work well!) and I needed some filler text. As a part of my experience to rely upon open source software for design, I did the whole thing in Inkscape which worked out really well but the function that created random text wasn't working.

I went to duckduckgo and searched for lorem ipsum - and got a page of filler text in return!

This was a great time-saver for me and another reason to continue using Duck Duck Go.

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