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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)

#121

Post by explange »

klft wrote: post #78
explange wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mu…

A few years ago, I investigated if there is a business opportunity in quality search. The biggest hurdle I found no way around is the content. Not all but a lot of high-quality information is paid. You get access to it as a user but not if you want to index it as a platform. And you need a lot of different providers to have good coverage. That might get easier if you have lots of users, but you do not get users witho…

That's really interesting to know, thanks. I think for my purposes a lot of high-quality information isn't paid - it's academic, policy, and nonprofit sources mainly. I feel like you could make a lot of improvement for my purposes just by:

- Downweighting commercial sources and upweighting academic, government, and nonprofit sources.

- Using some measure of quality, maybe even something simple like length + reading age?

- Building big whitelists of quality sites and blacklists of low-quality sites, as picked by human curators and users

Beyond this, perhaps users could plug in sources that are particularly useful for them, including ones they have subscriptions to. I've thought it would be handy to have search results include ebooks, papers, and notes on my computer, for example.

But maybe the userbase of people who need high quality, non-subscription info is too small to get this started.

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

#122

Post by elric »

swebs wrote: post #103
elric wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Thanks for pointing that out! Should be easy enough to automate using Greasemonkey :-)

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

#123

Post by krick »

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.

Works fine with Russian. Shows "In partnership with Yandex" badge (Yandex is a major Russian search/email/etc company) in the corner on some searches. Whatever "partnership" means...

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

#124

Post by Kiro »

andreareina wrote: post #82
akie wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Unsurprisingly, I find DDG's search results good enough. I rarely go to Google, and only when DDG fails me. It might be helpful to point out that DDG (and other 'alternative' search engines such as Ecosia) get their search results from Bing.

DDG has its own index now, though it still augments that with other sources. https://help.duckduckgo.com/results/sources/

Their own index is not used for any organic search results, only Instant Answers and other widget stuff. Money quote from your page:

> We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we also source from multiple partners, though most commonly from Bing (and none from Google).

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

#125

Post by api »

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…

Google isn't standing still. They're getting worse over time. I've noticed a significant drop in their result quality even in the past 1-2 years. Meanwhile DDG seems to be slowly improving. They are now my default and I only go to Google if I can't find something with DDG.

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

#126

Post by mikorym »

magicalhippo wrote: post #33
mikorym wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Right, but it's kinda annoying having to turn it on and off, as it remembers and I keep forgetting what I used last. If I'm searching for programming stuff or similar, I want it off. If I'm searching for shops that sells bricks for my new wall, I want local results. I've also noticed that even with it on, the "local" indexing is distinctly significantly worse than Google. That is, Google is much, much better at findi…

Then you just type:

"!g something I am looking for via some super invasive method and random intimate knowledge about myself"

and press enter.

But I've found that I don't use Google that much. Maybe I type longer phrases in now? I wouldn't know, and DDG hopefully doesn't know either.

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

#127

Post by arturhoo »

hnarn wrote: post #5
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!

I admire the initiative but there is no way people will pay for a search engine.

I'm happily paying for DNS (nextdns.io), I don't think paying for an equivalent search engine would be a stretch.

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

#128

Post by cercatrova »

DarkWiiPlayer wrote: post #108
riffraff wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Interesting, I don't think I've seen an ad on Google (or anywhere, really) in years. I've been using uBlock Origin on desktop and mobile (Kiwi Browser on Android, as well as AdGuard).

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

#129

Post by Neff »

yaktubi wrote: post #107
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)

In the UX world they are usually called urgency or scarcity triggers [1][2]. They also play in to the social default bias [3] people tend to have, where when alone you tend to do things that you know others have done.

1: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/259906084_Scarcity_... 2 (PDF): https://www.uvic.ca/socialsciences/economics/assets/docs/sem... 3: https://www.coglode.com/gem/social-default-bias

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

#130

Post by arkades »

baryphonic wrote: post #114
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…

When I switched to DDG, I was happier with it than with Google. To me, DDG feels like Google felt ten years ago, before it was infested with "AI." Today, Google search results look more like the invasive shopping mall ads in Minority Report, tailored to what it thinks I'll click on, rather than relevant results based on my query. I only rarely (~once a month) have to use Google search to find something that DDG just…

I find it depends on how much I know what I'm looking for. If I know exactly what I'm trying to get to, google will usually get me there faster. If I don't, DDG is usually a good place to start, as it's less festooned with SEO'd garbage sites. And, worst case, there's always !g.
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