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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)

#51

Post by woodrowbarlow »

joe_fishfish wrote: post #24

I like DuckDuckGo, but it's much worse than Google at localisation. It's annoying to have to search, then repeat the search with "UK" on the end to make it realise I'm not interested in buying e.g. building supplies or coffee or beer from US-based businesses. I get that it has no concept of who I am when I search, but some kind of localisation based on IP address could maybe help? Also, it feels a little disingenuous…

i think localization is tricky for DDG for non-technical reasons. their value proposition is privacy, and computer privacy is poorly understood by most users. to many, "this thing knows where i live" would seem like a contradiction in purpose.

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

#52

Post by bulldog13 »

DuckDuckGo is finally good enough to use as a daily driver.

About 2 years ago I tried it and I constantly found myself using !g to get decent results.

Now I only need to use !g some of the time for programming or technical searches. It works great for everything else.

I just wanted to add this because I was anti-DuckDuckGo for awhile until I recently retried it.

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

#54

Post by worble »

itsspring wrote: post #39
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.

Well, it's kind of obvious Google tracks you, and your previous searches, and uses that data to personify your next result. DDG doesn't track you. https://techcrunch.com/2018/12/04/google-incognito-search-re...

The offshoot from this as well is: go to someone elses PC and do a query in google. You might find the results are just nowhere near what you want or expect.

Or tell someone to google something while on a call and click the 1st or 2nd link. You might be lucky and they're the same as yours, but more than likely than not they won't be.

DDG on the other hand, so long as I make the same query within a given timeframe, I'm relatively certain to get the same results back, regardless of which browser profile or PC I'm on. That reliability is (at least to me) a feature, and a damned useful one at that.

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

#55

Post by speg »

bulldog13 wrote: post #52

DuckDuckGo is finally good enough to use as a daily driver. About 2 years ago I tried it and I constantly found myself using !g to get decent results. Now I only need to use !g some of the time for programming or technical searches. It works great for everything else. I just wanted to add this because I was anti-DuckDuckGo for awhile until I recently retried it.

Yep. I switched to DDG last year and haven’t looked back. Between Safari/Firefox, DDG, Fastmail, and Apple Photos I think I’ve moved myself almost entirely off of Google.

Recently set up a Pi-hole to shield me from the rest. What else am I missing? Oh, YouTube! Drat. I’m a sucker for hobby videos on there. I’ve seen a couple of alternative front ends but nothing that has really stuck so far.

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

#56

Post by chris_f »

naibafo wrote: post #42
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

Not the poster, but here is an example. Elsewhere in this thread I posted a fact that I knew, but wanted to double check. It was about the LexisNexis news database containing 35k sources.

Here are the queries for "lexis news 35000" on Google and DDG:

https://www.google.com/search?q=lexis%20news%2035000

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=lexis+news+35000&ia=web

The information I was looking for is in the first Google results. I didn't see it on the first page of DDG at all.

This was just my last search as an example without even trying too hard to come up with one.

I like DDG, but Bing (where the majority of DDG's organic results come from) is not as good as Google for organic web results IMO.

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

#57

Post by deadbunny »

mikorym wrote: post #29
joe_fishfish wrote: post #24

I like DuckDuckGo, but it's much worse than Google at localisation. It's annoying to have to search, then repeat the search with "UK" on the end to make it realise I'm not interested in buying e.g. building supplies or coffee or beer from US-based businesses. I get that it has no concept of who I am when I search, but some kind of localisation based on IP address could maybe help? Also, it feels a little disingenuous…

There is a slider that allows you to put it on or off. If your IP is in the UK, the slider will say "United Kingdom on/off" or something like that.

This is super unreliable for me when it comes to "shopping" type results. I'll often have to append "uk" to get it to actually return UK results, even then it can be hit and miss.

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

#58

Post by rietta »

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.

I find myself throwing !g when I want to find a programming specific thing. Not sure this is because Google's results for niche tech sites is better or because I am more familiar with how to craft these as Google queries having used it almost exclusively since 1998.

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

#59

Post by darkerside »

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…

It's funny, the first time I tried to switch to DDG, I couldn't make it stick. I eventually realized it was because I was frustrated by the lack of sports reporting carousels, which is admittedly a very silly reason.

I simply changed my behavior to use a sports website directly for those queries, and DDG has been totally sufficient for everything else.

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

#60

Post by deadbunny »

vs2 wrote: post #4

I am going to build my own search engine but with a monthly subscription fee. No ads, no tracking and I don't keep logs of your activity. So across between a VPN and a Search engine!

> So across between a VPN and a Search engine

I fail to see how this is anything like a VPN. Just a search engine with a monthly fee.

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