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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)

#181

Post by ravenstine »

gxqoz wrote: post #174
ravenstine wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you regularly use !g, then why don't you just use Google? Serious question. It seems like if you are resorting to Google enough, there's almost no point for you to be using DDG.

I'd say I need to use it for less than 5% of queries. And often those 5% aren't solved by Google either because they're just hard to search for stuff or my original query wasn't good enough. I do regularly use other Google search services, though. In particular, Google Books.

Google Books is still pretty decent, although I wish they still were scanning old books. I think they discontinued that.

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

#182

Post by kohtatsu »

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…

Yes, I often miss being able to do "1 second / 2 MB in minutes / 1.2GB"

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

#184

Post by mav3rick »

cercatrova wrote: post #131

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's worse is that these people hate Google. Many do because they failed the interviews there and openly state this as the reason for their criticism.

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

#185

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#186

Post by lostlogin »

ravenstine wrote: post #173
lostlogin wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

If you regularly use !g, then why don't you just use Google? Serious question. It seems like if you are resorting to Google enough, there's almost no point for you to be using DDG.

Regularly yes, but it’s a small portion of my searches. Google as a company is something I want to avoid.

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

#187

Post by wolfgang42 »

reaperducer wrote: post #157
wegs wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

  $ time units -v '2 feet + 2 meters' feet
        2 feet + 2 meters = 8.5616798 feet
        2 feet + 2 meters = (1 / 0.11679951) feet

  real    0m0.009s
  user    0m0.005s
  sys     0m0.004s

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

#188

Post by bla3 »

jamespullar wrote: post #168
bla3 wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Hey cool, then that page changed recently. I hadn't heard of duckduckbot, that's exciting!

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

#189

Post by aqfamnzc »

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.

Not necessarily - I would imagine many searches directly using Bing would return some form of "personalization" extending past the search terms itself. Duckduckgo claims not to consider this AFAIK. Although maybe the same supposed benefits of a search based purely on query could be achieved by a Bing or Google search without cookies.

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

#190

Post by bmn__ »

chris_f wrote: post #56
naibafo wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Not the poster, but here is an example. Elsewhere in this thread I posted a fact that I knew, but wanted to double check. It was about the LexisNexis news database containing 35k sources. Here are the queries for "lexis news 35000" on Google and DDG: https://www.google.com/search?q=lexis%20news%2035000 https://duckduckgo.com/?q=lexis+news+35000&ia=web The information I was looking for is in the first Google results.…

You are mistaken in assessing the situation, this has nothing to do with results, but with query composition.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=lexisnexis+35000+news+sources

You have trained Google to recognise Lexis as an alias for LexisNexis. DDG does not offer that, so one has to spell it out explicitly. You have to decide whether it's acceptable for you to change habits back to the common ground for Web searching.

The value provided by magic intent recognition (as opposed to traditional searching for keywords) differs from person to person. On the whole, it's likely for the better and that's why that feature was implemented at Google, but I have also read countless complaints about it on HN because situationally it pollutes results and can't be turned off.

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