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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)

#161

Post by thesuitonym »

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…

Even DuckDuckGo is becoming more like Google in it's uselessness. I think the problem stems from the idea that new is always better, so all search platforms become infested with garbage sites that are automatically generated to capitalize on the current search patterns.

For instance, I was feeling nostalgic and wanted to look at the Space Jam website last night, but I couldn't remember the URL, so I searched for "space jam". The first page was all garbage results about a potential Space Jam 2. Okay, that's generating a lot of buzz, I get it. So I searched for "space jam website". The results were hundreds of identical culture blogs talking about the website. Nowhere was the link to the actual website, which turned out to be spacejam.com by the way (I thought it was warnerbros.com/archive or something...)

Same thing with other search terms. I've been playing a lot of Animal Crossing lately. I remember a time when you could search for a topic about a video game and find a website answering the question, or a forum post with relevant information. Now all you get are blogs posted by people who clearly don't have English as their first language, and likely have not played the game. It's keyword blogs and fandom.com/wikia all the way down,

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

#162

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

lostlogin wrote: post #144
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…

> When I switched to DDG, I was happier with it than with Google. I regularly do !g, but I think the thing that is reducing that fastest is the declining quality of Google results. If I search for ‘x, y and z’, I then see a load of results with small text underneath saying ‘include z?’. It drives me demented, why wouldn’t I want to include my search terms?

> I regularly do !g, but I think the thing that is reducing that fastest is the declining quality of Google results

I don't know how I feel about it, but I feel like this has happened in multiple places now: The dominant option is losing ground to competitors, not because they got better, but because the dominant option got worse. I've similarly argued that the Linux Desktop is now at least as good as Windows (and possibly MacOS), not because our UIs suddenly got more friendly (although they have improved), but because Microsoft shipped the Windows 8 ("who needs the start menu?") and 10 ("we'll merge the old and new control panels any day^wyear^wdecade now") interfaces, so the bar is so much lower. I don't know that this is progress, but it's great if you want FOSS to win. Likewise, it sucks that Google is getting worse, but hey, at least now there's less reason not to use DDG...

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

#163

Post by bla3 »

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…

In reply to c: DDG doesn't do the search bits itself, it just uses Bing results.

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

#164

Post by chris_f »

reaperducer wrote: post #158
chris_f wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

- 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.)

Neither am I, but this is the correct link with the information that confirmed Lexis has 35k news sources, and the one I was looking for.

This didn't appear on DDG at all.

And a lot of the other sites you list are about LexisNexis.

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

#165

Post by mcintyre1994 »

systemBuilder wrote: post #137
MaxBarraclough wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I always found it weirdly honest that at every career fair all the Facebook and Google people were just working on ads.

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

#166

Post by Semaphor »

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…

not sure what's the bang for UK, but for Germany it's !ddgde

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

#167

Post by bla3 »

jamespullar wrote: post #143
mikkom wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Duckduckgo results are from bing via bing api so you are essentially saying that you like bing results more than google results.

Per https://help.duckduckgo.com/results/sources/ , "...DuckDuckGo gets its results from over four hundred sources. These include hundreds of vertical sources delivering niche Instant Answers, DuckDuckBot (our crawler) and crowd-sourced sites (like Wikipedia, stored in our answer indexes). We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we also source from multiple partners, though most comm…

That page basically confirms this. It says:

> To do that, we've developed an open source Instant Answer platform called DuckDuckHack,

which links to https://duckduckhack.com/ which says "DuckDuckHack is now in Maintenance Mode".

And the "four hundred sources" link links to 400 special case replies. They are probably useful, but fire rarely. It's basically Bing, and that page is a bunch of spin.

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

#168

Post by jamespullar »

bla3 wrote: post #167
jamespullar wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Per https://help.duckduckgo.com/results/sources/ , "...DuckDuckGo gets its results from over four hundred sources. These include hundreds of vertical sources delivering niche Instant Answers, DuckDuckBot (our crawler) and crowd-sourced sites (like Wikipedia, stored in our answer indexes). We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we also source from multiple partners, though most comm…

That page basically confirms this. It says: > To do that, we've developed an open source Instant Answer platform called DuckDuckHack, which links to https://duckduckhack.com/ which says "DuckDuckHack is now in Maintenance Mode". And the "four hundred sources" link links to 400 special case replies. They are probably useful, but fire rarely. It's basically Bing, and that page is a bunch of spin.

The page I linked above doesn't mention DuckDuckHack. Are you quoting that from a different source? It does mention DuckDuckBot which is their own web crawler.

https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/du...

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

#169

Post by Kiro »

vivekkalyan wrote: post #152
mikkom wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How is it false? It literally says all traditional links are mostly from Bing: "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)."

All the other 400 sources and their own crawler are just used for Instant Answers and widgets.

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

#170

Post by Kiro »

cerberusss wrote: post #140
mikkom wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

If you exclude Instant Answers and widgets then pretty much, but the important thing is that they don't send your PII to Bing. Not saying that sarcastically. For me it doesn't matter what the underlying data source is.
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