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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)

#71

Post by akie »

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…

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

It might be helpful to point out that DDG (and other 'alternative' search engines such as Ecosia) get their search results from Bing.

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

#72

Post by swyx »

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…

do you find DDG slower to load than Google? I have a slow mobile data connection, and noticed that DDG was much slower to load than Google. not sure if it is a raw point of presence thing, or if my phone (android chrome) is cheating somehow to load Google faster.

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

#73

Post by johnward »

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…

DDG is good enough for me usually. I very rarely find myself using !g to go to google. Usually, when I do it's to see where my own sites rank on google. I do find google better at local search, which makes sense since they know more about me. Like if I want to look up my pharmacy's phone number. It's always the first result in google but I get mixed results from DDG. Overall, Duck is pretty good though.

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

#74

Post by zozbot234 »

eloc49 wrote: post #65

I think Google only keeps DuckDuckGo around so they can claim they have “competition.”

It's not always a bad thing. The duck.com domain used to redirect to Google for a long time (they got it in a random acquisition) but now it's been changed to DDG instead. I'm pretty sure that this kind of analysis played a role there. (A more diversified ecosystem in search also helps with fighting SEO spam, which is by far the biggest actual threat to Google Search volume.)

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

#75

Post by wegs »

vikbytes wrote: post #34
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…

For doing math in DuckDuckGo, may I suggest adding !wa to the query, it will redirect the query to Wolfram Alpha and give you a better result. :)

Oddly, I don't find WA to be great. WA can do complex math, but it's slow. To give a good example of what I've come to expect from all three, type "2 feet + 2 meters" into:

* WA: You'll get a correct result, but it takes 4 seconds.

* Google: 0.185806 square meters, obviously (instantly)

* DDG: Search results

Curiously, I find Google's to be the most helpful. I see the obviously incorrect result and instantly fix it. DDG gives me nothing. WA is too slow to e.g. play around with numbers.

My last computation was trying to figure out which bolt to get for a hole (with McMaster's selections for both bolts and, at some level, holes). I was converting hole sizes / bolt sizes between metric and imperial, and between fraction and decimals, playing around until I found a combo which worked. Once I had Google giving the right answers, I could play around until it worked. With WA, I would have had to wait 4 seconds each time.

By the time I'm doing anything beyond that, it's generally in numpy. There isn't really a spot for WA in between.

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

#76

Post by a1a1a1a1a1a1 »

vs2 wrote: post #4

I am going to build my own search engine but with a monthly subscription fee. No ads, no tracking and I don't keep logs of your activity. So across between a VPN and a Search engine!

Doesn't a monthly fee mean you'll require users to sign in? In the purest sense that's tracking, you're just promising to immediately forget all of the correlations you're making between users and queries. I think you'd need a privacy policy/payment contract that adds a liability to the business to maintain privacy for users to trust that you aren't and wont track them.

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

#77

Post by test1235 »

chris_f wrote: post #56
naibafo wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have an example or generally what kind of searches you are referring to? My experience with ddg has been "good enough" at least. The few times I don't find anything usable on ddg I ususally end up not finding anything on Google either

Not the poster, but here is an example. Elsewhere in this thread I posted a fact that I knew, but wanted to double check. It was about the LexisNexis news database containing 35k sources. Here are the queries for "lexis news 35000" on Google and DDG: https://www.google.com/search?q=lexis%20news%2035000 https://duckduckgo.com/?q=lexis+news+35000&ia=web The information I was looking for is in the first Google results.…

>Nexis : | LexisNexis

>[Search domain www.lexisnexis.com.my/en-my/products/nexis.page] www.lexisnexis.com.my/en-my/products/nexis.page

>Nexis is an online service for your strategic news and business research. Search for content from 35,000 publications. Conduct accurate searches of the 35,000 international sources in the Nexis online service. Make informed business decisions after getting the latest news and market reports.

this was the 8th result for me in DDG, with no filters or customisation or anything

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

#78

Post by klft »

explange wrote: post #46
rahulroy wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I and/or the company I work for would. Google is awful for finding the kind of high quality, niche information I need in my job. It just returns lowest common denominator rubbish. May I know the niche that you are referring to? Also, how do other search engines like DuckDuckGo performs against Google?

I'm a consultant/researcher advising charitable foundations. It means I need to research all sorts of different topics depending on what area the foundation is interested in. e.g. one project might be on humanitarian aid, another on educational technology, another on infectious disease. So I don't need a search engine in a particular niche, I need a search engine that is good at finding high quality information in mu…

A few years ago, I investigated if there is a business opportunity in quality search.

The biggest hurdle I found no way around is the content. Not all but a lot of high-quality information is paid. You get access to it as a user but not if you want to index it as a platform. And you need a lot of different providers to have good coverage. That might get easier if you have lots of users, but you do not get users without content. The platform chicken-egg problem.

Profitable niches like Bloomberg’s business information definitively exist but this would not be the high-quality generic search engine you described.

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

#79

Post by yters »

akie wrote: post #71
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…

> Unsurprisingly, I find DDG's search results good enough. I rarely go to Google, and only when DDG fails me. It might be helpful to point out that DDG (and other 'alternative' search engines such as Ecosia) get their search results from Bing.

Why not just use Bing?

Also, how is this not a problem? If DDG ever becomes popular enough to be a threat, Bing just stops providing them search results.

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