duckduckgo...is it really worth it?

I’ll have to admit, that until  Nixie Pixel shared up this article  that I had never even heard of the search engine Duckduckgo.com.  

Duckduckgo is purported in the article as a search engine that is gaining traction with the growing concern of privacy issues in the online world, in fact the article states that 

“Many people are looking away from major search engines like Google and Bing and moving to Duckduckgo, a service that guarantees it doesn’t save your search information.”

Duckduckgo even goes as far as producing Websites that use info-graphics to explain how they are different from Google and Bing (both of linked in the above article by itworld, i’ll leave it up to you to read through them if you want)

But the big question is just how are the results with this search engine anyway.  Well to give things a try I decided to try a search for My Web Design company Inertial Zen Designs, the results, delivered quickly, saw My company’s website at the top of the list, the Google Plus page in second and rounding out the top three My page on Facebook.  A little further down the list were returns for My linkedin profile and an outdated link to My personal website, which I moved off of webs.com a few months ago.  These results can be seen in the screen capture below

The next thing I noticed prior to even looking at following any of the links was a little message actually asking me to make an exception in adblock to actually allow their advertiser’s ad reach me,

a detail that frankly threw up a red flag for me due to the fact that the entire promise of the site is Anonymous searching, and yet here they are trying to serve up an Advertisement that I can only presume is being generated off the query of my initial search.  However a full look in the cache and cookies did not find anything specifically placed on My local machine as far as cookies, a step in the right direction.

Overall, what’s your opinion of this search engine, which it appears has been around since 2010 by the looks of the article? Leave your comments below.

The “Soundbite” Society

The Sound byte, that little line stated in an interview or comment, that causes people to instantly turn their heads, to pay attention to a topic and hopefully look into things further.  Media has been using it for as long as media has existed, the bullet point from a President, statements like “No one ever expected this…” usually along with some sort of image to increase the attention of the masses.  There’s just one problem with the SoundBite, it’s becoming the expected norm when it comes to communications.

As society’s daily pace increases, and we have Technology managing our lives more and more, the trend has been for us to consume information in quick, short bursts.  Sites like Facebook, Google Plus and Twitter have lead towards the concept of getting the world to you in 140 Characters or less becoming common place and people screaming out responses like 

“Did you have to put your answer in the form of a text wall?

Communications were designed to get information across to another party, a sound byte being the point that brings the other party’s attention to a matter so that the situation can be discussed and investigated.  and the Soundbite, in it’s brevity usually results in an overshadowed broader  context leading to it being considered misleading or inaccurate.

How does this effect Website design you may ask? It’s said that content is key when it comes to a Website, that the content of a a site is what keeps the user there for longer than the time it takes to type in a new URL address.  Keeping this in mind, when the content for a Website is being created it should remember to take into account just why it is being put into existence.

Should content creators use the soundbite to get the consumers of said content to their Website? Without a doubt the answer to that question is a resounding YES! However once you have the consumers there, it’s always best practice to offer them a fair, informed and balanced representation of the content you are presenting, after all Customers do value honesty in those they deal with.