Is DDG one person?
Yeah, Gabriel Weinberg: http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/
Don't forget Eli!
A Duck & a Wiki Team Up Against the Content Farms
31–40 of 68 posts
Re: A Duck & a Wiki Team Up Against the Content Farms
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the difference is the attitude is different now - when Cuil launched the world laughed and said nothing could be as good as Google. Almost 3 years later a small, insignificant yet maybe not, number of people are starting to use alternatives. A good parallel could be Firefox - Internet Explorer was the way to browse the internet, now they're just a way. If Google wants to be the search engine a decade from now…
People laughed at Cuil because it was laughably bad, not because nobody is allowed to make a search engine.
Sure it was bad - but was every decision* they ever made so fundamentally wrong that they couldn't possibly have improved? The world wrote them off completely 8 minutes after they launched, and they were a meme like the next day. (* in search, not their ridiculous perks etc)
When I search for online games on DDG I get stuff like this in the first 'page' of results:
- http://onlinegames.innovative-solutions-group.com/
- http://onlinegames.webfreehosting.net/
Did DDG and Blekko both independently, really stumble upon formulas that beat Google, or are we actually open to the possibility of not using Google for search now?
Re: A Duck & a Wiki Team Up Against the Content Farms
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you happen to know how DDG is making money, then?
I know of a couple ways: - Adding affiliate codes to the search results: https://duckduckgo.com/privacy.html The relevant part is "we may add an affiliate code to some eCommerce sites (e.g. Amazon & eBay)". It looks like this is where most of the revenue comes from, according to http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2011/01/26/can-a-start-u... . Relevant part is "The site is self-funded and saw about $15,000 in revenue…
Wouldn't this mean DDG is giving amazon information about it's users?
I love DDG, but this seems shady putting the affiliate code into search results. Amazon ranks great, but it seems this would encourage DDG to rank Amazon even higher. Google would get in quite a bit of trouble for doing this.
Re: A Duck & a Wiki Team Up Against the Content Farms
#34Re: A Duck & a Wiki Team Up Against the Content Farms
#35Google has mentioned they're working on the content farm problem. I would expect them to make some moves faster that are smarter than banning content farm X while partnering with content farm Y. Likely algorithmically, coz that's how they roll.
Google would do well for itself to stop horsing around with attempts to find 'algorithmic solutions' (if that's actually what they're doing), and in the short-term doing what's necessary to make a perceivable improvement in the quality of their product. Even if the content farms were changing domains regularly, Google could probably kill them faster than they'll find a way to algorithmically drop the ranking of their results, in aggregate.
For all of the recent noise that Google has been making about fixing this problem, the number of gamed search results in their index is still insanely high. Take plant diseases for example...every time I've made a search for some specific problem related to my houseplants, the results are so loaded with content-farm crap that I have to go at least a page or two in to get to reliable sources of information.
We're not even talking about relevant webspam from plant stores or online merchants...just eHow garbage, which is poorly regurgitated from the other sources that come lower in the results.
Re: A Duck & a Wiki Team Up Against the Content Farms
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
I know of a couple ways: - Adding affiliate codes to the search results: https://duckduckgo.com/privacy.html The relevant part is "we may add an affiliate code to some eCommerce sites (e.g. Amazon & eBay)". It looks like this is where most of the revenue comes from, according to http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2011/01/26/can-a-start-u... . Relevant part is "The site is self-funded and saw about $15,000 in revenue…
Wouldn't this mean DDG is giving amazon information about it's users? I love DDG, but this seems shady putting the affiliate code into search results. Amazon ranks great, but it seems this would encourage DDG to rank Amazon even higher. Google would get in quite a bit of trouble for doing this.
No, we're not giving any more information than would otherwise flow by clicking on a link in the SERPs. And actually, we're giving less information than if you would click on the same result in Google because we're not sending your search terms via the referrer header. We've stayed away from things like commission junction because then you would be giving away information as it is routed through a third-party. For more info, see the privacy policy: http://duckduckgo.com/privacy.html. In the other direction, Amazon doesn't share any personal info.
Re: A Duck & a Wiki Team Up Against the Content Farms
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you happen to know how DDG is making money, then?
I know of a couple ways: - Adding affiliate codes to the search results: https://duckduckgo.com/privacy.html The relevant part is "we may add an affiliate code to some eCommerce sites (e.g. Amazon & eBay)". It looks like this is where most of the revenue comes from, according to http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2011/01/26/can-a-start-u... . Relevant part is "The site is self-funded and saw about $15,000 in revenue…
Wow, Matt, I'm not sure if I should be flattered or scared that you're paying this close attention to DuckDuckGo :).
The $15,000 is less than my graduate school stipend was. Needless to say, we're not raking in the dough here.
I just added this to the FAQ, i.e. how do you make money (I don't see any ads)? We'd like to show minimal advertising and make the venture more sustainable, for sure, but haven't been able to find a good ad provider willing to work within the DDG privacy principles.
Re: A Duck & a Wiki Team Up Against the Content Farms
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
People laughed at Cuil because it was laughably bad, not because nobody is allowed to make a search engine.
Sure it was bad - but was every decision* they ever made so fundamentally wrong that they couldn't possibly have improved? The world wrote them off completely 8 minutes after they launched, and they were a meme like the next day . (* in search, not their ridiculous perks etc) When I search for online games on DDG I get stuff like this in the first 'page' of results: - http://onlinegames.innovative-solutions-group.com…
Anything can be improved — but in Cuil's case, yes, it would have required reversing pretty much every decision they made (or at least implementing them on such a different level they would be unrecognizable). It was just breathtakingly ill-advised. DuckDuckGo is more clear about the benefits it offers, modest though they may be, and it follows through on its boasts. And Blekko is just modest all around.
I said at the time and still say that Cuill released a very early stage experiment that still hadn't worked out what it wanted to do and called it a search engine.
Re: A Duck & a Wiki Team Up Against the Content Farms
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
People laughed at Cuil because it was laughably bad, not because nobody is allowed to make a search engine.
Sure it was bad - but was every decision* they ever made so fundamentally wrong that they couldn't possibly have improved? The world wrote them off completely 8 minutes after they launched, and they were a meme like the next day . (* in search, not their ridiculous perks etc) When I search for online games on DDG I get stuff like this in the first 'page' of results: - http://onlinegames.innovative-solutions-group.com…
Thx for the specific example, always very helpful! But in this case, I'm having trouble reproducing. Do you have a region set or something? I'm looking at http://duckduckgo.com/?q=online+games and don't see those domains. I'm not saying the other domains are good :), but I just want to understand what you're seeing. We definitely have a problem right now of over-weighted the domain name in the url.
Re: A Duck & a Wiki Team Up Against the Content Farms
#40Google has mentioned they're working on the content farm problem. I would expect them to make some moves faster that are smarter than banning content farm X while partnering with content farm Y. Likely algorithmically, coz that's how they roll.
For the record, the vast majority of our content farm stuff is algorithmically based. In addition, we've made some manual blocks and since the beginning we've been promoting good content in our "Zero-click Info" boxes. Recently it has been a lot of programming stuff, e.g. http://duckduckgo.com/?q=python+split