[billmalarky]

"I think it is a mistake to concentrate on clean design on a search engine until the searching algorithm is not that good. AFAIK Google's page ranking algorithm is well known, when I were in university I even heard stories that a student (going on the same class as me) reproduced the algorithms only on his own!"

Dude they're working on it. Modern search isn't as easy as having a college student implement a crawler with the pagerank algorithm, don't belittle the team like that.

[_zekiel]

Thanks! We'd also encourage every developer to check out: http://duckduckhack.com/ The example reported doesn't seem to be an issue the organic links but if you find any at all, please let us know. Also, we're on the lookout for any instant answers that pop by default but are irrelevant for the query. If you see any, please let us know at https://duck.co/forum

[amenod]

How about you incorporate "flag as irrelevant" button next to each result? Or some way of users reporting back to you the order they would expect from your SE? I am not sure how you could combat misuse, but I'm sure there coule be some measures taken.

[JoshTriplett]

I'd like to see this as well. There used to be a single link for the results page to report bad results, though it didn't allow adding any details or flagging particular links. And even that seems to have disappeared.

[_zekiel]

We'll definitely think about how to improve this! We added the Feedback button in the Menu options so that people used the Feedback page: https://duckduckgo.com/feedback That way, the reports are really actionable (since it's broken out by type) and people don't spam the form :\

[JoshTriplett]

I saw that link, and the categorization seems fine, but following the feedback link doesn't automatically capture the search data. You need a link that automatically includes the search query, so that the user doesn't have to manually transcribe that data.

Ideally, you should do so via JavaScript inline on the search query page, to make it easy for the user to note the bad search results without switching back and forth between the results page and the feedback page.

Click feedback link, click category, identify relevant/irrelevant results, optionally type a sentence or two, submit. That flow needs some UX optimization.

[hrjet]

> people don't spam the form

Use captchas; a rather obvious solution, but mentioning in case you overlooked it.

[truebosko]

The "Answers" /goodies link here just goes to the splash page. Do you know the correct page?

http://duckduckhack.com/