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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)

#61

Post by chris_f »

thatoneuser wrote: post #9
hnarn wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I admire the initiative but there is no way people will pay for a search engine.

Not that I'm going to be the average user here, but I'm desperate to pay for a search engine that works like I want. I've lost so many hours on google that the cost would make itself up. Just yesterday stuck in another gRut, looking for "what is X" to receive nothing but "how to implement X!". Valuable hours lost every week. I'd happily pay for a search engine that just got it right.

I've lost so many hours on google that the cost would make itself up. Just yesterday stuck in another gRut, looking for "what is X" to receive nothing but "how to implement X!".

See bullet #2. https://www.runnaroo.com/blog/the-search-engine-hacker-news-...

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

#62

Post by m-p-3 »

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…

> c) Unsurprisingly, I find DDG's search results good enough. I rarely go to Google, and only when DDG fails me.

and this is where the !bang shortcuts are useful, and I like to think that DDG analyzes which requests were made with those bangs to hopefully refine and tune their systems to provide better results over time.

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

#63

Post by woodrowbarlow »

joe_fishfish wrote: post #24

I like DuckDuckGo, but it's much worse than Google at localisation. It's annoying to have to search, then repeat the search with "UK" on the end to make it realise I'm not interested in buying e.g. building supplies or coffee or beer from US-based businesses. I get that it has no concept of who I am when I search, but some kind of localisation based on IP address could maybe help? Also, it feels a little disingenuous…

> it feels a little disingenuous to say Google is not a search company, it's an advertising company. DDG's revenue is also built on ads.

ddg runs ads on their site. google operates an advertising network, connecting advertisers with sites who are willing to run ads.

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

#64

Post by darkerside »

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.

Posted the same elsewhere. I've been able to change my own behavior to look for sports reporting elsewhere. Agreed Google has done an excellent job of it.

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

#66

Post by ForHackernews »

darkerside wrote: post #59
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…

It's funny, the first time I tried to switch to DDG, I couldn't make it stick. I eventually realized it was because I was frustrated by the lack of sports reporting carousels, which is admittedly a very silly reason. I simply changed my behavior to use a sports website directly for those queries, and DDG has been totally sufficient for everything else.

Parts of DuckDuckGo are open source, so you might be able add your own sports results to their "zero click answers": https://github.com/duckduckgo/zeroclickinfo-goodies

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

#67

Post by mauvehaus »

bulldog13 wrote: post #52

DuckDuckGo is finally good enough to use as a daily driver. About 2 years ago I tried it and I constantly found myself using !g to get decent results. Now I only need to use !g some of the time for programming or technical searches. It works great for everything else. I just wanted to add this because I was anti-DuckDuckGo for awhile until I recently retried it.

I've been using it pretty much exclusively for a lot longer than 2 years. I think part of the trick to switching is that google has got us trained as to how to search for stuff in a way that gets the results we're looking for.

It took maybe a month to feel like I was searching effectively after switching, but I never found ddg's results to be appreciably less relevant at that point.

On the upside, since ddg is less popular than google, people have put less effort into getting crap pages higher in the search results, though I'll concede it's gotten worse over the last couple of years.

For me, the bangs are the killer app, combined with searching from the browser bar: I don't have to wait for e.g. google maps to load to do a maps search if I search !m pizza in Poughkeepsie.

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

#68

Post by nojito »

garmaine wrote: post #23
nojito wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because Lexis has a massive database of news stories and the rights to share it.

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.

Google news doesn’t have great archives nor does it vet sources which is essential for research use cases.

Lexis survives because it’s a phenomenal product.

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

#69

Post by theferalrobot »

speg wrote: post #55
bulldog13 wrote: post #52

DuckDuckGo is finally good enough to use as a daily driver. About 2 years ago I tried it and I constantly found myself using !g to get decent results. Now I only need to use !g some of the time for programming or technical searches. It works great for everything else. I just wanted to add this because I was anti-DuckDuckGo for awhile until I recently retried it.

Yep. I switched to DDG last year and haven’t looked back. Between Safari/Firefox, DDG, Fastmail, and Apple Photos I think I’ve moved myself almost entirely off of Google. Recently set up a Pi-hole to shield me from the rest. What else am I missing? Oh, YouTube! Drat. I’m a sucker for hobby videos on there. I’ve seen a couple of alternative front ends but nothing that has really stuck so far.

How are you liking Apple photos, considering the switch myself

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

#70

Post by elric »

joe_fishfish wrote: post #24

I like DuckDuckGo, but it's much worse than Google at localisation. It's annoying to have to search, then repeat the search with "UK" on the end to make it realise I'm not interested in buying e.g. building supplies or coffee or beer from US-based businesses. I get that it has no concept of who I am when I search, but some kind of localisation based on IP address could maybe help? Also, it feels a little disingenuous…

I hate Google's localisation. My Accept-Language is set to English, I search for stuff in English, and Google throws piles of Dutch search results at me simply because I happen to be in Flanders. /ncr used to do the trick, but that's still showing me all sorts of Dutch stuff I'm not interested in.
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