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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)

#211

Post by cercatrova »

DarkWiiPlayer wrote: post #199
cercatrova wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting, I don't think I've seen an ad on Google (or anywhere, really) in years. I've been using uBlock Origin on desktop and mobile (Kiwi Browser on Android, as well as AdGuard).

I only have uMatrix, which blocks most annoying iframe ads, but doesn't target things like googles ad results which are part of the page itself. Googles ads are actually quite nice in that they aren't flashy images, but they do appear like normal search results. It's the same for DDG, but there the ads have a big "AD" in a box behind the title; meanwhile in google it's way harder to visually parse what you want to cl…

You should definitely use uBlock Origin as well then, as it completely blocks all search ads.

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

#212

Post by Grimm1 »

mdaniel wrote: post #205
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 wit…

Yup still Demo mode the index is more than a few months old at this point. We're close to launching a beta with a much larger unrestricted index and a re-crawl strategy that keeps things fresh.

We've also changed our ranking methodology. The alpha / demo there was focused on novelty so if you search say "machine learning" you'd get repos that were recently active, starred and (hopefully) relevant to the topic, worth noting we also hard down-ranked repos that had been around for a while to let the smaller ones show through.

Through user conversation we moved away from focusing on novelty and moved onto "information staleness" the idea that elements in search results do not decay in relevance as quickly as they should based on real world events that happen around them. Happy to talk more about it if you want.

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

#213

Post by mywittyname »

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?

Probably 3/4s of the time that I use !g on DDG, it's because I need location to be a component of my search. Like trying to find a plumber.

If DDG has an flag to use location info for search relevance, I'd do that instead.

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

#214

Post by mywittyname »

finiteloops wrote: post #175
JTon wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It drives me demented, why wouldn’t I want to include my search terms? Well, I think the answer to your question is Google is trying to be friendly to the layman. It's not hard to think of examples where the user inputs a something into the search box that a CS major knows will not result in the implied wants of the user. Google tries to do a lot of human to machine translation work, and I think you're seeing the r…

This works for the masses, but in my experience when machines force a use case, it causes more headache than not cause I'm not like the masses. A barely related side rant: my microwave decided it wants to error out when it thinks you're trying to microwave air. i have a bowl in there. stop telling me to open the door to put something in. Whatever engineer at GE thought they would be smarter than the user, you're one…

We have the same microwave.

I also hate that "feature".

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

#215

Post by garmaine »

chris_f wrote: post #44
garmaine wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would wager that Google's database of new stories is bigger. LexisNexis survives partly through institutional inertia, but also I expect because they've tailored their search product to their specific niche in a way that is much more useful than Google's general-purpose algorithms.

I would wager that Google's database of new stories is bigger. You are correct. Lexis only has 35k news sources. Their one strength is that their news archive goes back to the late 70s. The real difference is that Lexis's core business is B2B. Enterprise pricing defies the laws of reason for what people will pay for software vs B2C.

Google's news articles goes back way further than the 70's. They've been scanning newspapers and integrating digitization archives. This is why you can you can look at word usage trends centuries back. But it's not very well integrated into search.

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

#217

Post by truebosko »

neebz wrote: post #53

It's a bit strange but for me Google's biggest pull is live scores. I follow cricket, tennis and football. And all the dedicated websites are heavy and slow (cricinfo, espn etc). Google scores are quick to load and update even before the rest.

Hah, was thinking the same. There really is an opportunity to build a site out of this need. Not revolutionary, but a niche one can own

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

#218

Post by HomeDeLaPot »

bla3 wrote: post #163
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.

That's what I had heard before, but I looked it up and it's not quite accurate. They do have their own crawler, and they pull from "400 different sources", Bing being one of the major ones. https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/so...

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

#219

Post by jl2718 »

bambax wrote: post #31

I 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.

I think google has gotten really terrible recently. Seems like SEO hacking is back with a vengeance.

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

#220

Post by jl2718 »

MattGaiser wrote: post #14
zerr wrote: post #11

While we are at it - what is the business model for freeware web browsers such as Vivaldi, Firefox, etc... I know they have some deals with MS, Google and friends but how such deals are done? Is it from some personal contacts or do you have to apply officially? What are the particular numbers - is it something you have to negotiate? What is the range in this case? etc...

Mozilla makes a referral fee from search engine searches made with the browser. Their revenue is in the hundreds of millions. https://www.cnet.com/news/google-firefox-search-deal-gives-m...

So basically the advertising companies own the whole stack. Explains a lot.
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