N
o sooner do you get one article about a search engine, but then along comes another. It's now becoming more commonplace for search engines to start adding in extra content to search results - Google's knowledge graph being one example. DDG has now partnered with Zanran (a search engine that provides tabular, spreadsheet and statistical data) to provide quick snippet answers to queries. Here's an example of what I mean:
You can check this out for yourself with the same child poverty search. Try other searches - but make sure that they are very tight, since this feature doesn't work with vague searches. By leaving off the '2012' from the search I used above results in a normal set of results, without the Zanran data.
Hi Phil,
The oddity you noticed (about missing out the '2012') is a bug on DDG that I hope we can fix. It should have worked - and if you try it today you'll probably find it does.
For some reason even if you enter the same or similar query twice it doesn't show the Zanran result. No idea why.
cheers
Jon
Posted by: Jon Goldhill | October 17, 2012 at 09:58 AM