What is the business model for DuckDuckGo? (2017) • Hacker News Board

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

#91

Post by clarry » Thu, May 28, 2020, 1:45 PM UTC

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…

> b) Software quality does not scale linearly with manpower.

I believe there's a tipping point after which software quality doesn't scale at all; in fact, it only starts getting worse. People confuse quantity (roughly: number of features) for quality and they think they're improving quality by throwing more and more developers at it.

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

#92

Post by ashtonkem » Thu, May 28, 2020, 1:45 PM UTC

chris_f wrote: post #48

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…

"Curiously, I'd say 90% of the time I use Google is for math. If I'm typing a complex math expression (especially with units), Google tends to do much better than DDG." This is interesting because it highlights the changing expectation of web search engines from when they were just tools to find relevant webpages for a query. Search engines have morphed into all-purpose utility and information tools. The bar for what…

I wonder if that’s an OS specific thing. I find that nowadays I use Spotlight on OSX for math expressions, not Google.

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

#93

Post by cl0wnshoes » Thu, May 28, 2020, 1:50 PM UTC

bluedino wrote: post #20

I've been seeing DDG billboards all over, which seems weird.

I just saw my first one yesterday and made me instantly question how they paid for that and what their business model was.

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

#94

Post by naibafo » Thu, May 28, 2020, 1:51 PM UTC

pastrami_panda wrote: post #47

naibafo wrote: 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!

nice happy to hear that. You're welcome

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

#95

Post by occamschainsaw » Thu, May 28, 2020, 1:52 PM UTC

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…

If you don't want to use Google even for math, I would suggest WolframAlpha[1]. It can be used for much more complicated equations/unit conversions etc.

[1] https://www.wolframalpha.com

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

#96

Post by screye » Thu, May 28, 2020, 1:52 PM UTC

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…

I now realize that I have almost completely stopped using Google in it's most common setting. ie. just search for the thing you are looking for.

I use google almost exclusively to improve search on other websites or for special syntax based searches that are far easier to implement than good general purpose search.

Site:reddit.com , site:stackoverflow.com are my most common search queries. Otherwise, it use it to open Maps, YT, HN as a landing page. Research and news both are usually acquired from a curated list of sources I visit directly, with no involvement from google. If it is something specific then I will use "quotes" to find that exact thing. Outside that, google scholar and maps are amazing, but I don't think DDG is trying to compete there.

The idea of searching for something with only a vague sense of what it is, has almost completely stopped. For generic searches the 1st page results of medium pages and single pager MSM articles are both useless and shallow. It isn't Google's fault that popularity and quality are orthogonal to each other.

If I genuinely cared about my privacy, I would seriously consider trying DDG out. However, I have surrendered all my data to corporate overlords and don't think there is much point in struggling anymore.

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

#97

Post by MaxBarraclough » Thu, May 28, 2020, 1:54 PM UTC

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…

> 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.

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

#98

Post by newsch » Thu, May 28, 2020, 1:56 PM UTC

naibafo wrote: post #43

politelemon wrote: post #13

While I am supportive of their business model, and search functionality, I find it off-putting the way they speak of privacy but then use maps provided by a GAFAM which are ultimately profit oriented and can _not_ be trusted to safeguard privacy regardless of their marketing. OSM would be a great choice here. I'll even dare to speculate that they were financially incentivized to make their choice in the face of a sup…

You can use different Map backends for the map functionality, OSM amongst them

Is there a way to do this for the maps search? I only see an option to change the directions provider.

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

#99

Post by naibafo » Thu, May 28, 2020, 1:57 PM UTC

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.…

Interesting, the first link on Google is the 5th link on DDG for me.

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

#100

Post by speg » Thu, May 28, 2020, 1:58 PM UTC

theferalrobot wrote: post #69

speg wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I'm happy with it. I'm not sure why I resisted turning on iCloud Photos. It makes cross device management a non-issue. Now I just need to find the time to cull my 20k something photos...

The major sticking point remaining is a shared library. I have my photos. My wife has hers. How do we manage photos of our children without duplicating?