>but that Bing and DDG have improved so much that they are now on Par
Worth noting that these are essentially the same. DDG scrapes a handful of sites but they lean heavily on Bing's search API (or Yandex, if you search in russian).
It would be interesting if there could be some independent consumer group that would be able to grade search engine results and compare them regularly. To not only hold them accountable but give credit where it's due too.
>Ideally you could use Bing as your default engine, then fall back to Google whenever there's a search that doesn't yield good results.
This is what I do with DDG. Unless I have a pretty specific search, or want Google's really nice live sports scores widgets, DDG is usually pretty good.
>DuckDuckGo earns revenue by serving ads from the Yahoo-Bing search alliance network and through affiliate relationships with Amazon and eBay.
>In July 2016, DuckDuckGo officially announced the extension of its partnership with Yahoo! that brought new features to all users of the search engine, including date filtering of results and additional site links. It also partners with Bing, Yandex, and Wikipedia to produce results or make use of features offered. The company also confirmed that it does not share user information with partner companies, as has always been its policy.
> DDG already includes Google (amongst others) in its results. It's not just a front end to Bing, like many assume (though I can't find DDG's article on the subject to directly cite).
Per DDG's own help pages, they use mostly Bing and no Google. (The mixture of over 400 sources that they claim is used to provide the infobox-type results, which they call "Instant Answers", not the regular search results)
> We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we also source from multiple partners, though most commonly from Bing (and none from Google).
> If more and more people start using DDG, their results will also improve.
Let's say everybody stops using Google right now and starts using DDG with its anonymous, proxied queries to Bing. How does this in any way improve search results? You could maybe argue that heavy direct use of bing.com would give Microsoft some useful training data. But none of that changes the fact that Bing's crawlers aren't that good, and neither is its search engine.
This is not an endorsement of this article's allegations, or even of of Bing. But.
DDG uses Bing as one of its primary sources of data, and IMO DDG results are better than Google's for me both professionally and personally today. Maybe DDG is doing some special sauce behind the scenes, or maybe they're blending results from multiple sources, but that quality of search means I'm not at a point where I can unilaterally dismiss Bing and promote Google. Google's search results have just slid backwards too much lately.
> They aren't a first class search engine, they get results from other search engines. Perform a search on DDG, then do the same search on Bing
You search for the thing and you find the thing. Why do you expect the results, especially the top results, to be different? Is there any other evidence that they are not doing searches themselves?
"I can think of a number of widely touted alternatives which utterly failed to do so: Cuil, Bing, Blekko, A9, Teoma, and more"
Fanchildren, stop. You know that DDG is an untenable alternative without Bing, right? Sure, they do a little bit of their own result integration, but when you actually compare results side by side, there are very few differences:
My point is not that DDG shouldn't exist, or that it won't diverge, but that to claim that DDG has traction that Bing does not is silly. Bing is larger (and more popular: it's a top-50 global website!) than DDG, and it is clearly providing much of the technical infrastructure for DDG.
> Bing is their initial and primary source of data for web links. Not the only one either, but the primary one. They maintain their own index from it.
What is their other data source? And how did it come to suffer from the same problem?
I keep seeing insinuations that DDG has some other secret source than Bing, but it's always hand waved and never explicitly named. Incidents like this seem to strongly imply that only Bing really matters at the end of the day.
> [Bing] now powers ... DuckDuckGo. You see, DDG is nothing more than a glorified UI over Bing's infrastructure.
Citation needed, as they claim they pull in from a number of sources, one of them including Bing. "A glorified UI over Bing" seems like a bit of a stretch, but if that's actually true, it would be good to know.
DDG is just a wrapper for Bing.
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