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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)

#151

Post by rkangel »

DDG is surprisingly good, but still not good enough. I have my desktop browser using it, but still haven't on mobile.

When searching for technical queries Google tends to give much more useful answers - useful is the key word here. To give an example from yesterday, the query 'elixir zlib'.

In DDG I get links to C files in Linux kernels on a server called elixir. I get a useful answer 5 results down (which is fine, it's there). In Google, the first result I get is the erlang zlib documentation (which is what you actually use in elixir).

Things like error messages, queries involving the name of a programming language etc. are often just not as good in DDG.

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

#152

Post by vivekkalyan »

mikkom wrote: post #136
baryphonic wrote: post #114

Earlier 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.

Can we please stop this meme? Every thread about DDG invariably seems to bring up this (false) statement.

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

#153

Post by klft »

explange wrote: post #121
klft wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

Interesting feedback. Thanks!

> a lot of high-quality information isn't paid

Maybe I was biased towards paid content because I did an enterprise search project on scientific articles before.

> users could plug in sources that are particularly useful for them

That could work if you have a local copy of the data which can be indexed. E-Book DRM might be a problem.

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

That was my impression. I almost always got puzzled looks when I described the idea. And most of those people were “knowledge workers”. But if you are a specialist, you already know where to look for the information you need in your area of expertise.

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

#154

Post by ForHackernews »

ForHackernews wrote: post #66
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.

Parts of DuckDuckGo are open source, so you might be able add your own sports results to their "zero click answers": https://github.com/duckduckgo/zeroclickinfo-goodies

Nevermind, it's deprecated. :(

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

#155

Post by rurp »

ForHackernews wrote: post #66
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.

Parts of DuckDuckGo are open source, so you might be able add your own sports results to their "zero click answers": https://github.com/duckduckgo/zeroclickinfo-goodies

I like the idea of contributing to DDG but that repo doesn't seem to be in active development.

If anyone knows of other ways to contribute code to DDG I (and probably others) would be interested.

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

#156

Post by reaperducer »

Mirioron wrote: post #142
ashtonkem wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if that’s an OS specific thing. I find that nowadays I use Spotlight on OSX for math expressions, not Google.

How does it compare to Wolfram Alpha in your opinion?

Siri draws answers from Wolfram Alpha, so maybe Spotlight does, as well.

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

#157

Post by reaperducer »

wegs wrote: post #75
vikbytes wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For doing math in DuckDuckGo, may I suggest adding !wa to the query, it will redirect the query to Wolfram Alpha and give you a better result. :)

Oddly, I don't find WA to be great. WA can do complex math, but it's slow. To give a good example of what I've come to expect from all three, type "2 feet + 2 meters" into: * WA: You'll get a correct result, but it takes 4 seconds. * Google: 0.185806 square meters, obviously (instantly) * DDG: Search results Curiously, I find Google's to be the most helpful. I see the obviously incorrect result and instantly fix it.…

"it's slow... it takes 4 seconds"

My, how far we've come.

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

#158

Post by reaperducer »

chris_f wrote: post #87
test1235 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Nexis : | LexisNexis >[Search domain www.lexisnexis.com.my/en-my/products/nexis.page] www.lexisnexis.com.my/en-my/products/nexis.page >Nexis is an online service for your strategic news and business research. Search for content from 35,000 publications. Conduct accurate searches of the 35,000 international sources in the Nexis online service. Make informed business decisions after getting the latest news and market…

this was the 8th result for me in DDG, with no filters or customisation or anything So that link was 9th for me in DDG, but that exactly proves the point. Google returned a relevant result in the first position. In addition, look at the result snippet from DDG: The world is moving fast - Nexis news alerts help you keep up by delivering current news and information related to companies, trends, and events that matter…

Google returned a relevant result in the first position.

Copy/pasting your query into Google returned:

- A newspaper article about Mississippi death benefits

- A link to the Lexis Nexis site in Singapore (I'm in the United States and haven't been to Singapore in 15 years, and never with this computer.)

- A link to a financial web site in Finland

- A Google Books entry about global warming

- A Google Books entry about "The Law of the Internet"

- A lawsuit web site

- More climate change web sites, more Google Books, and something that looks like it scrapes government web sites for bidding opportunities.

Duck Duck Go returned:

- A full page of car links, but with the correct Lexis Nexis result as the third entry.

The Duck wins.

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

#159

Post by mD5pPxMcS6fVWKE »

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…

Software is only part of a major search engine. Another part, no less costly is hardware. You need a lot and lot of computers to scrap and index the web. To be more specific, Google had 2.5 million computers back in 2016. Luckily, DDG doesn't need nor hardware nor much software, as they are mostly just intermediary between you and Bing.

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

#160

Post by reaperducer »

worble wrote: post #54
itsspring wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'…

Or have a guest use your wifi, and see Google ads tied to their searches for six months after they leave.
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