Some commentors are saying Google is worse. As someone who uses Google, what's been worse about it? With regards to ads, I don't see them as I use uBlock Origin on desktop and mobile (as well as other ad blockers and no-script extensions).
What is the business model for DuckDuckGo? (2017)
131–140 of 229 posts
Re: What is the business model for DuckDuckGo? (2017)
#132So first off personal bias, whize.co is the search engine I and my co-founder have been working on, it was nice to see basically our intended business model entirely validated by this article. Aside from the work we've done to validate it of course.
We entirely agree with their stated aims here but believe we can produce more quality search results than many current engines, hopefully it works out.
Re: What is the business model for DuckDuckGo? (2017)
#133DuckDuckGo 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…
I now realize that I have almost completely stopped using Google in it's most common setting. ie. just search for the thing you are looking for. I use google almost exclusively to improve search on other websites or for special syntax based searches that are far easier to implement than good general purpose search. Site:reddit.com , site:stackoverflow.com are my most common search queries. Otherwise, it use it to ope…
> Site:reddit.com , site:stackoverflow.com are my most common search queries.
You could probably use bangs for that...
https://duckduckgo.com/bang?q=reddit
https://duckduckgo.com/bang?q=stackove
just prepend your searches with them, e.g. the following is equivalent to your SO search:
!sod something to search
Re: What is the business model for DuckDuckGo? (2017)
#134Earlier 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.
Not anymore. Ruth Porat has been Ruthlessly cutting all the "give back to mankind" projects, YouTube became profitable recently after TEN years of losses, and Google for work is now profitable which means Google drive and Google docs makes money, finally. when I worked on search for Google we had 700 people in a building that was probably 25000 square feet. It felt almost like a chicken farm. Not many people born in America worked there.
Re: What is the business model for DuckDuckGo? (2017)
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
This is basically exactly my experience. Google's index is much more current and contains more obscure content. When I know exactly what I'm looking for but forgot the exact name or something like that, Google's fancy AI really helps. For more general queries, DDG is sometimes better.
Re: What is the business model for DuckDuckGo? (2017)
#136DuckDuckGo 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…
Duckduckgo results are from bing via bing api so you are essentially saying that you like bing results more than google results.
Re: What is the business model for DuckDuckGo? (2017)
#137DuckDuckGo 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…
> A 50-100 person team can do /almost/ as well as a 10,000 person team in the same domain. You spend a lot to go from 90% to 99% or 99% to 99.9%. I'm reminded of how AMD's graphics division is a fraction of the size of nVidia.
Search is not ten thousand it is not even a thousand people. People don't realize that Google is actually double click add engine plus a relatively small search team; not 50 but less than 1000.
Re: What is the business model for DuckDuckGo? (2017)
#138DuckDuckGo 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'd like to prefer DDG...
but recently I noticed what seem to be blind spots on many (maybe less popular?) topics. e.g. I can't find how to setup/configure borgbackup on nixos via ddg for any of ~3-5 query variations I tried. For non-logged-in google with uBlock the relevant documentation is the first hit.
Re: What is the business model for DuckDuckGo? (2017)
#139I 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
I will try to document it for the next time this comes up.
I notice that Google is better at naturally knowing what I am looking for, and that DDG will show dodgy websites more often.
If I am searching for a PDF or a user manual, DDG will give me a lot of sites that are almost certainly malware laced (pdf-manuals.xyz) or something vs. what I get from Google.
Their maturity filter doesn't work as well, either.
Re: What is the business model for DuckDuckGo? (2017)
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Duckduckgo results are from bing via bing api so you are essentially saying that you like bing results more than google results.
Is that really all there is to it? Present results from Bing, and done?