This is potentially really good news. I've always loved the concept of W|A but hated the implementation. While very good at answering specific queries, it's no good at incidental or exploratory knowledge discovery - it's kind of out of the way, a little on the slow side, but most importantly it doesn't link externally (or even internally). I get the vibe that the W|A crew have an excellent idea and are doing an excellent job, but don't really "get it" when it comes to everyday usability. As they admit in their subtitle, they've built an engine, not a whole machine.
On the other hand, usability is DDG's killer app as far as I'm concerned. The focus on ease of interpretation as well as interaction is really valuable.
Simply having W|A's answer on the same page as a bunch of direct links to alternative sources is valuable enough.
But if I get a bit excited, if the power of the vast knowledge & computational ability of W|A finds its human voice through DDG, it could start to bridge the gap between "search" and actual knowledge retrieval. It's one (good) thing to remove 1 click by showing a number relating to a simple query - it's another thing to remove 50 clicks and 45 minutes of research and assessment to establish the answer to a one-step-above-simple query.
What I'd love to see as a start is for W|A to provide facts & figures against results returned through DDG. Eg. Search the web for "most popular travel destinations in europe", and be able to summon demographics, exchange rates, even trip prices for each result.
On the other hand, usability is DDG's killer app as far as I'm concerned. The focus on ease of interpretation as well as interaction is really valuable.
Simply having W|A's answer on the same page as a bunch of direct links to alternative sources is valuable enough.
But if I get a bit excited, if the power of the vast knowledge & computational ability of W|A finds its human voice through DDG, it could start to bridge the gap between "search" and actual knowledge retrieval. It's one (good) thing to remove 1 click by showing a number relating to a simple query - it's another thing to remove 50 clicks and 45 minutes of research and assessment to establish the answer to a one-step-above-simple query.
What I'd love to see as a start is for W|A to provide facts & figures against results returned through DDG. Eg. Search the web for "most popular travel destinations in europe", and be able to summon demographics, exchange rates, even trip prices for each result.