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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)

#201

Post by magicalhippo »

worble wrote: post #115
magicalhippo wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. In all fairness, how exactly do you expect DDG to know what you want from this, without doing some sketchy privacy invasive scanning of your search? If you really want a company to scan your every search and then tailor the results specifically, then by all means use…

Well in my case, if I write Norwegian words, it's highly likely I want Norwegian results.

Also as mentioned, if I search for "thai restaurant" (which is written exactly the same in Norwegian as in English), the chances are very high I want a local thai restaurant in my city and not one on the other side of the planet.

Even if I enable location in DDG the search results includes a bunch of thai restaurants in Asia and the US. The map insert however is pretty spot on however, so all is not lost.

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

#202

Post by qchris »

Kiro wrote: post #124
andreareina wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

I agree that quote is there (and have read the surrounding context), but it doesn't seem to me that it actually says that DuckDuckBot results aren't used in any non-Instant Answer search result, which I think is a distinction. They're very clearly synthesizing results from multiple sources, including many from Bing, but neither that page nor the DuckDuckBot-specific page seem to directly exclude the use of their internally-crawled results in the non-Instant Answers search results. Did I perhaps miss something?

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

#203

Post by acheron »

ravenstine wrote: post #172
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?

Not to delegitemize your use of `!g`, but I'm sure I'm not the only one who never needs to use that, and if that's true, I think we need to hear more from the people who are perfectly happy with DDG by itself. Who else here doesn't use !g?

Same. I've been using DDG regularly since.. I don't know, 2013 maybe. (iOS 8 added DDG as a choice for a default search engine; that was at the end of 2014, and I had already been using DDG for quite awhile when that happened.)

It's been a long time since I used !g for anything. I did for awhile as an alternate search, but eventually it stopped being helpful -- if I didn't find any good results in DDG, then the Google results didn't help either. At this point it's probably been a couple years since I did a !g for anything.

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

#205

Post by mdaniel »

Grimm1 wrote: post #132

So 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.

> This alpha is limited to GitHub results.

ok, so:

https://alpha.whize.co/search?q=KubeConfigLoader&page=1&n=10

cheerfully says: "Showing 0 - 0 out of 0 for: KubeConfigLoader" although in your defense, it was blazingly fast to return that result. The shape of your XHR response seems to indicate you have an ES instance with only one shard, so maybe the site is still running in demo mode or something?

contrast that with: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=site%3Agithub.com+KubeConfigLoader

As a meta observation, in the bottom corner of every DDG result that I've ever received is a "Send Feedback" button, allowing me to advise them of bad search results in a very low friction way, but I had to come here to report my experience with your site

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

#206

Post by Kiro »

qchris wrote: post #202
Kiro wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

I agree that quote is there (and have read the surrounding context), but it doesn't seem to me that it actually says that DuckDuckBot results aren't used in any non-Instant Answer search result, which I think is a distinction. They're very clearly synthesizing results from multiple sources, including many from Bing, but neither that page nor the DuckDuckBot-specific page seem to directly exclude the use of their inte…

You're right but at the same time they say that they source their "traditional links in the search results" from "multiple partners", which to me seems to imply that it's from partners only and not their own crawler.

Try searching for something random like "woxioai" on DDG and you will see that the search results are identical to Bing (albeit a slightly different order but I presume they do some internal sorting at least), while the search results are completely different on Google.

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

#207

Post by acidburnNSA »

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…

> Curiously, I'd say 90% of the time I use Google is for math. If I'm typing a complex math expression (especially with units), Google tends to do much better than DDG.

I used to use google for this too, until I discovered GNU units [1]. GNU units is vastly superior to Google for complex formula and runs quietly in my command line.

Some examples:

Q: What's 72°F in °C?

A: $ units "tempF(72)" "tempC"

22.2

Q: How many teaspoons are in a tablespoon?

A: $ units "1 tbsp" tsp

3

Q: What is the total energy content of 1 kg or uranium, burned completely in a breeder reactor?

A: $ units "1 kg /(238 g/mole) * 200 MeV * 6.022e23 / mole" "MW*days"

938 Megawatt-days

Q: How many femtobarns are in a square teraparsec?

A: $ units "teraparsec^2" "femtobarn"

9.5e99 (very close to a google)

Q: How many hectares are there in a baker's dozen of mm^2?

A: $ units "10 bakersdozen mm^2" "hectares"

1.3e-08

[1] https://www.gnu.org/software/units/manual/units.html

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

#208

Post by abstractbarista »

acidburnNSA wrote: post #207
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…

> Curiously, I'd say 90% of the time I use Google is for math. If I'm typing a complex math expression (especially with units), Google tends to do much better than DDG. I used to use google for this too, until I discovered GNU units [1]. GNU units is vastly superior to Google for complex formula and runs quietly in my command line. Some examples: Q: What's 72°F in °C? A: $ units "tempF(72)" "tempC" 22.2 Q: How many t…

Just installed it. This is really cool! Thanks for enlightening.

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

#209

Post by Forbo »

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 like to use !s instead so it will leverage Startpage as a proxy for Google searches. Same results, but at least I can try to hide in a crowd.

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

#210

Post by D-Coder »

IB885588 wrote: post #30
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…

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.

"Split hairs". If that's not... splitting hairs.
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