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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)

#221
post #200
post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Same! I knew about duckduckhack, but that it had been put in "maintenance mode" a couple years ago, but wasn't aware that DDG had started operating their own crawler. It's exciting to see--I'm hopeful they'll be able to leverage it to improve their result quality and capabilities while staying privacy-friendly.

They have been crawling for a while and AFAIK the data is used at their instant answers, not on search results.

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

#222
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.

It's the truth. I'm sure representatives of DDG can correct us if this is not the case.

However they have never done so.

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

#223

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.

What about their CPU division?

Interesting question, I'm afraid I don't know.

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

#224
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.

Yes. DDG actually pulls search results from Bing and a few other searches. They don’t actually scrape the web.

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

#225
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you set the localization to whatever language you are searching in? At least for German it has been working well that way IMO

I have no idea how I missed that! For those unaware there's a little toggle just beneath the search bar - and yes, it did improve the results! Thanks!

Google used to have the same feature a long long time ago, in fact I'd have sworn that DDG copied it from google.

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

#227
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…

I think that it's O.K. when a user interface which issues a warning when it detects a dangerous condition.

The problem is when the warning is a "stop" and it doesn't have an override "I know what I'm doing".

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

#228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I prefer to splice them, personally, I like a challenge.
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