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ksahin | karma 1124 | avg karma 7.39 · 2019-07-15 12:52:58

"DuckDuckGo, which aggregates information obtained from 400 other non-Google sources, including its own modest crawler.)"

I looked into it, and it seems DDG is using Bing and Yahoo search API and lots of other sources. I looked into the pricing of Yahoo's search API / Bing search API,it ranges from $0.80 / 1000 queries to several dollars per thousand queries.

It seems to expensive to be economically viable with ads, what am I missing ?

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api | karma 31631 | avg karma 2.2 · 2019-07-15 12:54:25+00:00

They've negotiated a lower rate?

londons_explore | karma 35497 | avg karma 2.72 · 2019-07-15 13:13:48

Running a search engine is pretty expensive. $0.80 per 1000 queries doesn't seem orders of magnitude off the actual running costs.

For comparison, that works out to ~$15 per year for the average users search volume.

If you can't make $15 per user per year on search, you have bigger problems...

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judge2020 | karma 18790 | avg karma 2.87 · 2019-07-15 12:55:48

I see the duck crawler on my websites a fair bit now so chances are they're eliminating this expense, but even in 2015 the CEO said they were profitable (although this wasn't at the same scale as now) https://fortune.com/2015/10/09/duckduckgo-profitable/