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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)

#101

Post by jm4 »

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.

I've been using it at my daily driver since 2010. At first, I stuck with it because it wasn't Google. I noticed right away that it would turn up different results from what I came to expect at Google. Then I noticed that, although they were different, they were just as effective and getting me the information I needed. For example, it would prominently place websites I may not have heard of and that didn't show up high in the Google results, but when I just went with it anyway I discovered that relevant information that solved my problem was there.

I think a lot of people try out DDG, see some sites they don't recognize and then dismiss it as producing bad results because they are not Google results. We basically trained ourselves to use Google as the benchmark for what a search engine should produce - not in general terms of reliability of information but exact results. Then something else doesn't produce those same results and it's crap. Or, for a particular query, the top Google result is the best and the second or third DDG result is the best and that makes it crap. Search has always been a little bit of an art where you have to learn how to do it effectively and how to quickly parse your results.

I use Google maybe a handful of times a year and I would rarely find better results over there. It got to the point where I really didn't like their result page at all compared to DDG. It seemed spammy and it was difficult to parse. For a long time, they were fiddling around with things like displaying the full URL or making ads look more like legitimate results. On the other hand, DDG was doing things like zero click info and instant answers. I came to prefer their results much better. I showed up for the privacy and after a little while I stayed because it worked better.

I have tried Google a few times recently and they are doing some cool stuff with their results page. I particularly like the "featured snippets" and "people also ask" sections. Featured snippets is similar to DDG's zero click stuff, but it works with more complex queries like "best travel trailers for first time owners". But for years, DDG was doing cool things with the results page while Google was just a list of pages with ads, videos or news featured prominently at the top.

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

#102

Post by DarkWiiPlayer »

I find it very interesting that this article isn't just all "We're more holier [SIC] than google", but instead also argues that google could just as well adopt this busyness model. It doesn't defend google, but it doesn't paint it as this intrinsically evil IT-Monster that must be defeated, as many privacy advocates tend to do.

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

#103

Post by swebs »

elric wrote: post #70
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 hate Google's localisation. My Accept-Language is set to English, I search for stuff in English, and Google throws piles of Dutch search results at me simply because I happen to be in Flanders. /ncr used to do the trick, but that's still showing me all sorts of Dutch stuff I'm not interested in.

Nowadays you have to add ?hl=en to the query string.

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

#105

Post by virvar »

This is anecdotal, but I had a positive experience with the lack of privacy recently. I bought a baby stroller, after doing the typical research and finding a used model, I ended up buying a new one from some babyshop. All the pictures had shown the thing with the stroller “hat/head/sunscreen thing” (sorry I don’t know the English word for kalche), anyway, it wasn’t included and that was why the brand new stroller had been priced the same as the used ones.

But it’s bought and it’s nice, so whatever I hit the manufacturer website and find the correct product and google it, and get a flash sale from one of our most prominent baby stores. It was 350 Danish kr including delivery. Without closing the tap I check a few baby shops and a price checker website and see it’s actually 600-700 Danish krs everywhere, including on from the company the flash sale on google is form. So I buy it.

Apparently I hit the right combination of search history, and store advertising/inventory at exactly the right time.

Being curious I called my local baby store to ask why they could flash sale me at half price, and after a bit back and forth they apparently do this thing where they’ll catch you early with a cheap item and then when you come back they to buy it the next day it’ll be priced higher, except by then you’ve made up your mind to buy it and will pay the extra and I was just lucky having already made up my mind when I got it because the other store has been cheeky.

Not really related to DDG, but it’s the first time selling my privacy has paid off.

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

#106

Post by bernardlunn »

clarry wrote: post #91
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…

> b) Software quality does not scale linearly with manpower. I believe there's a tipping point after which software quality doesn't scale at all; in fact, it only starts getting worse. People confuse quantity (roughly: number of features) for quality and they think they're improving quality by throwing more and more developers at it.

Yep, read Mythical Man Month

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

#107

Post by yaktubi »

virvar wrote: post #105

This is anecdotal, but I had a positive experience with the lack of privacy recently. I bought a baby stroller, after doing the typical research and finding a used model, I ended up buying a new one from some babyshop. All the pictures had shown the thing with the stroller “hat/head/sunscreen thing” (sorry I don’t know the English word for kalche), anyway, it wasn’t included and that was why the brand new stroller ha…

I feel like the Airline industry does this when they say, “only 4 more tickets left!” Or “2 tickets recently purchased!”

There’s probably some terminology for this in game theory (well, general salesmanship too)

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

#108

Post by DarkWiiPlayer »

riffraff wrote: post #83
darkerside wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

it was the same for me, now I directly type !g whatever and get to them on google. It's good enough.

Did that a lot, but honestly, these days I find google unusable. The add section at the top seems to be steadily creeping down, replacing more and more actual search results; googles attempt to remove URLs from the web annoys me to no end because I often go by URI more than by title and the fact that DDG has the sites favicon next to the URI oh boy that's a useful feature. In fact, I'd say favicons are what I go for 80% of the time; and using google I just feel like I'm completely blind. The additional clutter (top stories, twitter links, etc.) only make it even harder to visually parse what I want.

And then there's DDGs option to quickly switch to results in germany and back to international, depending on what I need.

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

#109

Post by elliekelly »

ashtonkem wrote: post #90
IB885588 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to splice hair, but Google isn't just "surviving", so the amount needed for DDG to survive is probably even smaller than that. They don't need to be as profitable as Google Search (which is much more profitable than the company as a whole) to do well.

Google is not only massively profitable, they’re also running a ton of loss leading services designed to feed more data into the machine, like Gmail, as well as a ton of other experimental ventures that DDG isn’t doing. Google is also headquartered in some of the most expensive real estate in America, while DDG is in Pennsylvania. I’d bet that Google is paying a lot more in land cost per employee than DDG is.

I live near DDG HQ, it’s not even a whole building. It can’t be more than a handful of offices. DDG’s real estate expenses are essentially $0 compared to whatever Google is spending.

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

#110

Post by darksaints »

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…

Funny you mention math. That's the one area where I ditch Google in favor of Wolfram Alpha.
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