Live data from Hacker News

DuckDuckGo Raises $10M

news.crunchbase.com

51–60 of 261 posts

Re: DuckDuckGo Raises $10M

#54
I've been using DDG for several years now. I pretty rarely fall back to google for something these days and, when I do, they usually don't have the result I'm looking for either.

Re: DuckDuckGo Raises $10M

#55

I have been using DDG for about a year now, although I had tried using it years ago. It works fine for simple queries( e.g. search name of company rather than typing out url). But I basically have !g programmed into my fingers for everything more complicated. Many times when I don't find the results I am looking for, I subconsciously assume that google would be able to find them. This is in comparison to when I canno…

You are primarily going to get responses from people on threads like this who like and use DDG regularly. Selection bias. If you didn't find DDG useful, you wouldn't be using it, and probably don't have much commentary to add.

I don't see them truly competing with big budget search engines, but it's probably easy enough to make decent money from keyword ads and if you can sell the brand, you can get enough users to cover a smaller machine footprint and R&D budget that's orders of magnitude smaller.

The results are probably not awful (I don't use it). Result quality gets exponentially more difficult as you try to push that boundary, so you can probably get 80% of the quality there with 1% of the investment. The results may be good enough for plenty of folks, but I highly doubt they will ever be better than the big budget search engines.

Re: DuckDuckGo Raises $10M

#56

I have been using DDG for about a year now, although I had tried using it years ago. It works fine for simple queries( e.g. search name of company rather than typing out url). But I basically have !g programmed into my fingers for everything more complicated. Many times when I don't find the results I am looking for, I subconsciously assume that google would be able to find them. This is in comparison to when I canno…

I use a metasearch engine (searx) for precisely this reason. It aggregates results from any number of search engines, sending request to them in a very generic, non-identifying form, then displays them all on one page with a tag next to it to indicate where the source of the result came from. You can host Searx yourself or use a public instance, but using the public instance means you trust the operator to not log/filter results/inject ads(I don't know if folks do, but it would be possible) or do other nefarious things. It's pretty easy to host it yourself..

Re: DuckDuckGo Raises $10M

#57
DuckDuckGo is a great search engine, I've been using it for a while. The only thing that stops me from fully moving to DuckDuckGo is eseential DOM load speed. Google search results page loading speed is two times faster.

DuckDuckGo needs to hire a Frontend wizard that will address all the issues with load speed and hopefully make it quicker than competitors.

Re: DuckDuckGo Raises $10M

#58

DuckDuckGo claims to be all for privacy. What it doesn't tell users is that it is just a wrapper around Bing search results. The $10M they plan to spend is just going to increase search traffic to Bing.

Is this actually true?

https://duck.co/help/results/sources says they have 400 sources which is special cases like Wikipedia,etc. The core search is powered by Bing (Yahoo uses Bing) and Yandex in Russia.

Re: DuckDuckGo Raises $10M

#59

I have been using DDG for about a year now, although I had tried using it years ago. It works fine for simple queries( e.g. search name of company rather than typing out url). But I basically have !g programmed into my fingers for everything more complicated. Many times when I don't find the results I am looking for, I subconsciously assume that google would be able to find them. This is in comparison to when I canno…

You are primarily going to get responses from people on threads like this who like and use DDG regularly. Selection bias. If you didn't find DDG useful, you wouldn't be using it, and probably don't have much commentary to add. I don't see them truly competing with big budget search engines, but it's probably easy enough to make decent money from keyword ads and if you can sell the brand, you can get enough users to c…

This post reads perfectly if you replace DDG with "Google" and believe it's 1999.

Sure Google had a vastly superior algorithm but I don't think too many people really grasped that at the time.

Re: DuckDuckGo Raises $10M

#60
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are primarily going to get responses from people on threads like this who like and use DDG regularly. Selection bias. If you didn't find DDG useful, you wouldn't be using it, and probably don't have much commentary to add. I don't see them truly competing with big budget search engines, but it's probably easy enough to make decent money from keyword ads and if you can sell the brand, you can get enough users to c…

This post reads perfectly if you replace DDG with "Google" and believe it's 1999. Sure Google had a vastly superior algorithm but I don't think too many people really grasped that at the time.

Contrary to the seemingly popular belief, that their success was due to their algorithm, I used them because of their uncluttered and simple design.

That's why I used Altavista before that. Google kept things very simple while other sites loaded on the bloat and garbage.

I don't remember ever feeling like what I found with Google couldn't be found with Altavista or lycos. But a lot of the other companies tried to prematurely monetize to an excessive degree.

Post reply on HN