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What is the business model for DuckDuckGo? (2017)

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Re: What is the business model for DuckDuckGo? (2017)

#41

Post by naibafo »

pastrami_panda wrote: post #32
wegs wrote: post #27

DuckDuckGo has 50-100 employees, according to CrunchBase, while Google has over 100,000 employees. The exact numbers are irrelevant, but Google has around three orders of magnitude more employees than DDG. a) DDG needs about 1/1000th the revenue of Google to survive at its current scale. b) Software quality does not scale linearly with manpower. A 50-100 person team can do /almost/ as well as a 10,000 person team in…

> c) Unsurprisingly, I find DDG's search results good enough. I rarely go to Google, and only when DDG fails me. Same, my problem is that whenever I search for something that isn't english DDG can't find even the most basic stuff. Aside from that the migration has been pretty painless for me though so I have my hopes up.

Have you set the localization to whatever language you are searching in? At least for German it has been working well that way IMO

Re: What is the business model for DuckDuckGo? (2017)

#42

Post by naibafo »

bambax wrote: post #31

I dislike Google as a company but their search results are orders of magnitude better than the competition. DDG or Bing are, to me, very bad (aren't they almost the same anyway?) It's unclear why that is, and why search is so hard, but obviously it is.

Do you have an example or generally what kind of searches you are referring to? My experience with ddg has been "good enough" at least. The few times I don't find anything usable on ddg I ususally end up not finding anything on Google either

Re: What is the business model for DuckDuckGo? (2017)

#43

Post by naibafo »

politelemon wrote: post #13

While I am supportive of their business model, and search functionality, I find it off-putting the way they speak of privacy but then use maps provided by a GAFAM which are ultimately profit oriented and can _not_ be trusted to safeguard privacy regardless of their marketing. OSM would be a great choice here. I'll even dare to speculate that they were financially incentivized to make their choice in the face of a sup…

You can use different Map backends for the map functionality, OSM amongst them

Re: What is the business model for DuckDuckGo? (2017)

#44

Post by chris_f »

garmaine wrote: post #23
nojito wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because Lexis has a massive database of news stories and the rights to share it.

I would wager that Google's database of new stories is bigger. LexisNexis survives partly through institutional inertia, but also I expect because they've tailored their search product to their specific niche in a way that is much more useful than Google's general-purpose algorithms.

I would wager that Google's database of new stories is bigger.

You are correct. Lexis only has 35k news sources. Their one strength is that their news archive goes back to the late 70s.

The real difference is that Lexis's core business is B2B. Enterprise pricing defies the laws of reason for what people will pay for software vs B2C.

Re: What is the business model for DuckDuckGo? (2017)

#45

Post by virgilp »

wegs wrote: post #27

DuckDuckGo has 50-100 employees, according to CrunchBase, while Google has over 100,000 employees. The exact numbers are irrelevant, but Google has around three orders of magnitude more employees than DDG. a) DDG needs about 1/1000th the revenue of Google to survive at its current scale. b) Software quality does not scale linearly with manpower. A 50-100 person team can do /almost/ as well as a 10,000 person team in…

> c) Unsurprisingly, I find DDG's search results good enough. I rarely go to Google, and only when DDG fails me.

I felt the same way for a while and even switched the default engine to DDG... but lately, I've stopped finding things and I was increasingly searching with "!g" to get something relevant, so I just switched back.

Re: What is the business model for DuckDuckGo? (2017)

#46

Post by explange »

rahulroy wrote: post #22
explange wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I and/or the company I work for would. Google is awful for finding the kind of high quality, niche information I need in my job. It just returns lowest common denominator rubbish.

> I and/or the company I work for would. Google is awful for finding the kind of high quality, niche information I need in my job. It just returns lowest common denominator rubbish. May I know the niche that you are referring to? Also, how do other search engines like DuckDuckGo performs against Google?

I'm a consultant/researcher advising charitable foundations. It means I need to research all sorts of different topics depending on what area the foundation is interested in. e.g. one project might be on humanitarian aid, another on educational technology, another on infectious disease. So I don't need a search engine in a particular niche, I need a search engine that is good at finding high quality information in multiple niches. By high quality information I mean a mixture of academic articles, expert blog posts, podcasts with experts, policy reports, books, expert tweets, quality journalism etc.

I think there are other jobs that probably face this kind of problem, for example: policymakers, management consultants, journalists, nonfiction writers, some kinds of investors. They all need to rapidly learn things in topics outside of their expertise.

I haven't found other search engines much better, although I haven't yet done a systematic test. One thing that puts me off them is it seems from their marketing copy that most alternative search engines like Duck Duck Go are focusing entirely on being a privacy-preserving alternative. I want one that is focused on quality (and customisability), not just privacy.

I tried to install Searx so that I could at least get results from a variety of engines. But I got stuck in some dependency yakshaving so gave up.

Re: What is the business model for DuckDuckGo? (2017)

#47

Post by pastrami_panda »

naibafo wrote: post #41
pastrami_panda wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> c) Unsurprisingly, I find DDG's search results good enough. I rarely go to Google, and only when DDG fails me. Same, my problem is that whenever I search for something that isn't english DDG can't find even the most basic stuff. Aside from that the migration has been pretty painless for me though so I have my hopes up.

Have you set the localization to whatever language you are searching in? At least for German it has been working well that way IMO

I have no idea how I missed that! For those unaware there's a little toggle just beneath the search bar - and yes, it did improve the results! Thanks!

Re: What is the business model for DuckDuckGo? (2017)

#48

Post by chris_f »

wegs wrote: post #27

DuckDuckGo has 50-100 employees, according to CrunchBase, while Google has over 100,000 employees. The exact numbers are irrelevant, but Google has around three orders of magnitude more employees than DDG. a) DDG needs about 1/1000th the revenue of Google to survive at its current scale. b) Software quality does not scale linearly with manpower. A 50-100 person team can do /almost/ as well as a 10,000 person team in…

"Curiously, I'd say 90% of the time I use Google is for math. If I'm typing a complex math expression (especially with units), Google tends to do much better than DDG."

This is interesting because it highlights the changing expectation of web search engines from when they were just tools to find relevant webpages for a query.

Search engines have morphed into all-purpose utility and information tools. The bar for what makes a good search engine has been greatly moved forward. Organic web search results are now just one part of the measure of quality and relevance.

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