Things like this seem so arbitrarily hostile to intelligent people who just want to find what they're looking for in an efficient way. Why does this keep happening? Who benefits from these developments?
There are 10x the customers who don't have any idea about these search operators, and sometimes accidentally include one, and are dissatisfied with the results. Companies can't help but cater to the 10x bigger market. They probably spend money less carefully too, so are more valuable to advertisers.
I don't attribute any malice to this kind of thing. I just expect that if a project or product is trying to be more easy and delightful to more users, using telemetry and the latest UX design research etc, then it's going to stop being a tool for smart technical people, even if that's how it became known in the first place. It wants to be a solution, a product, not a tool.
I've realized that I like tools, particularly those that require skill to use. The mass market just always goes the other way. You'll have to find another niche project/product. The great benefit of locally-run open-source software is that you can keep using the tool even if the project goes a different way, and open-source projects can be forked by even smaller interested groups.
> There are 10x the customers who don't have any idea about these search operators, and sometimes accidentally include one, and are dissatisfied with the results
but then they could disable them by default, and users can enable them in the settings ? Removing them entirely just makes the product worse.
I take it you don't have real world experience with product management?
Adding options isn't free. If you drop a feature you can delete the code and stop testing it. It you make it an option instead, you need to maintain and test two features instead of one, even though one is only used by a tiny minority of users. If you have N binary options that creates a total of 2^N different configurations. If the features are perfectly orthogonal you only need to test N+1 things, but in reality, features may interact in unexpected ways, and you may have to test a significant subset of 2^N combinations to make sure you've covered all real-world scenarios.
And you will still get confused users. “Why does Bob get different results than me? Are you profiling me?” Alice complains, forgetting that she had turned a feature on/off in the options. etc.
That doesn't mean you should never add any options: many products require a certain amount of configurability to adapt to different user needs. But there is a cost to adding features, and a product manager should carefully consider the pros and cons. If “just make it an option” is your answer to everything you will end up with an unmaintainable product that is likely to confuse the majority of users.
I hear you, and yet DDG takes this to the extreme by maintaining completely separate frontends for those who don't want to run JS or want to sidestep the getting-started hand-holding (https://html.duckduckgo.com/html and https://start.duckduckgo.com/ respectively; while digging into that, I also learned they have https://lite.duckduckgo.com/lite too for whatever that does)
So a hypothetical expert.ddg.gg wouldn't be out of character for them
I am aware that there is a slight nuance here between what one may consider just theming of the frontend versus potentially changing how query syntax works, but I just wanted to point out that DDG has embraced UX-flags-via-domain-name which would be in-your-face different from some secret toggle on a settings page
I think with a "privacy focused" search engine that isn't the default on virtually any device or browser, you get a pretty savvy subset of the general population. The 10x probably use whatever the default search is.
> There are 10x the customers who don't have any idea about these search operators
The homepage of duckduckgo contains a lot of information about their products, and a whole FAQ about the search engine. Maybe if they also included a list of these operators, inexperienced people might learn about them.
People don't use these operators because they don't know about them, not because it's difficult.
Sites like DDG explicitly require opting out of the 'Google economy' which is going to bias their userbase disproportionately towards higher information users. I can even give a specific example how this changes things. In March 2022 DDG decided to start downranking "Russian disinformation." You might reasonably claim that the average response to this would be no worse than neutral.
But the impact on DDG? You can see the results on their traffic here [1]. I have to use an archive link because they removed public reporting of traffic figures shortly thereafter. The graph there defaults to display traffic averaged out over 365 days, but the day figure (on the top left of the graph) is configurable, since the data is (somewhat oddly) all client-side. Change it to something like a 7 day average to actually be able to see what happened.
Basically smaller sites are serving different demographics. That's precisely how they succeed. And this is also where a lot of their word of mouth comes from, which is going to be a major factor in their growth. Take your users for granted, and you risk losing not only them - but also the growth they would have provided you with. You even risk getting the opposite - of negative word of mouth. In any case, it's a sure path to rapid decline for any smaller company.
The same people who use such features are also on average
- more likely to use ad blockers.
- more likely to critically evaluate any advertising/propaganda they encounter.
- more likely to use VPNs and other technology that makes them more difficult to track.
- more likely to be "power users" of the service, thus consuming more resources than the average user.
Many more points like these apply, but the bottom line is that the ROI for such users, from the service provider's point of view, is terrible, so alienating them makes perfect business sense. And since competition has almost disappeared from the technology industry, there are no unintended consequences to be expected in most cases.
I think this one is really overrated. My family never asks my input on what to use; they always buy Apple stuff, inkjet printers with expensive ink subscription services, etc. If I try to talk to them about, for instance, getting a laser printer instead, it goes nowhere. Heck, just getting them to use Facebook Messenger to talk to me since I'm living on another continent is almost too much apparently.
In my experience, non-technical people don't ask power users what to use, because they'll get answers they don't want and conflict with all the slick marketing they've been brainwashed with. So instead, they'll frequently try to coerce their technical family members into buying the mass-market stuff they like instead, particularly iPhones.
This isn't because they don't want advice, it's because there isn't enough competition for the advice to be useful. It's not like Google spies on you and Microsoft doesn't. It doesn't really matter to them whether the Windows PC they buy is from Dell or Lenovo and they don't want to hear how to build one out of parts from Newegg and install Linux on it if it can't play the games they want to play.
Companies are then safe to ignore you recommending against their products when the users have no other viable options. Until they do. Then they become Kodak or Blockbuster Video because someone else makes a better product than theirs and they're so unaccustomed to customers having a choice that they lose the market.
There is competition, sometimes far better competition, but people don't want it. Laser printers are the big example here IMO: people spend a fortune on inkjet ink, but try to get them to buy a laser printer and they'll refuse because the up-front cost is higher, even though the long-term cost is much, much lower for most users.
Certainly if you print thousands of pages it is. If you only print something once a month it's not. But most of the people printing thousands of pages will quickly notice this when they're paying unreasonable sums for gallons of ink sold by the thimble.
Then you have the people at the margin, who would be better off with a laser printer, but only by something like tens of dollars a year. At which point the opportunity cost of the time to evaluate whether they would actually be saving money is on par with the money they would be saving.
Whereas if there was actually more competition, someone would be selling a cheap printer that takes cheap cartridges instead of your options being a cheap printer with expensive cartridges or an expensive printer with cheap cartridges.
No, printing once a month is FAR more expensive for inkjets, because you have to replace the ink cartridges every time you print, because the print heads dry out and get clogged. That doesn't happen with lasers.
If that was the case then it would be another thing people would notice, having to replace the ink cartridge every time they use the printer.
Unless they live in a place with the right level of humidity where once a month is exactly the right interval to print so they don't dry out. Or they print once a week, but still not enough pages to justify a more expensive printer. Or they print once a year, so replacing the ink cartridge every year is still cheaper than buying the more expensive printer.
Or they have no savings and only have access to high interest credit, so the interest on the price difference between the printers actually is more than the cost of buying an ink cartridge every month.
Sometimes people aren't as dumb as you might think.
>Sometimes people aren't as dumb as you might think.
Usually, they are.
>Or they print once a year, so replacing the ink cartridge every year is still cheaper than buying the more expensive printer.
Such as here. Doing this is stupid, because buying a new printer is cheaper than buying a set of cartridges for the same printer.
>Or they have no savings and only have access to high interest credit,
Or here, because they couldn't manage money and earned themselves a bad credit score.
>so the interest on the price difference between the printers actually is more than the cost of buying an ink cartridge every month.
If you have credit that bad, you don't need a printer at all. Plus, you can get a B&W laser for $100; less than the cost of an inkjet + a set of cartridges.
Sorry, but every way I look at it, inkjets are nothing more than a scam designed to prey on people who aren't good at long-term thinking or money management.
People are just stubborn and creatures of habit, and they dont want to expend energy on a change that is difficult and unimportant. That is the crux of it.
I have family that wont tolerate any changes on their smartphone, wont create or use an email account and such... they arent even very old. But it kinda reinforces your point: they dont really take power user advice either, especially if it conflicts with something they already know.
Also, I think computers used to be more enigmatic to the non techy, but now they are very accessible. People dont feel like they need help.
It is very, very, exceedingly rare where I am put into a conversation to recommend a search engine. I can recall about twice ever. While it’s true both times I did recommend DDG, my trusted recommendation to friends/family can’t be worth it to them alone.
The age of that being a differentiator has long gone. Most people I know either just use the default in their browser, or they type Google (sometimes into literally into Google!!!) because that’s what they’ve always done.
The last time someone asked me about search engines was probably 20 years ago.
This is a bit cynical but not wrong. Twice now I have ended up in conversations about how I would "re do" search if I could that talked about whether or not you could sell people the value.
When I was at Blekko we had a tremendously enthusiastic librarian user base who loved being able to curate the sites searched. But product was so focused on ads, nobody seriously considered a paid service. (Libraries subscribe to all kinds of services for example)
Most users however would not even provide an email address which would allow them to elide spammy sites from their searches.
My site always had the highest CTR for Ads from traffic coming from DuckDuckGo. One of the easiest traffic referral that neatly fits into an advertising bucket.
VPNs, privacy tools. You name it. These so called self-proclaimed smart people were trained like a sheeple to buy stuff.
It’s two orders of magnitude behind google for our website, but DDG is actually our 2nd biggest source of SE traffic, in front of bing. So I guess at least in Germany, DDG is doing well.
