My interpretation of this is they pay for API access and sends anonymised queries to Google and/or Bing.
I'm still puzzled how they get so extremely much better results compared to using any of thise directly or using DDG which does the same only with Bing.
Also a bit worried because I think there was a time when DDG felt the same before they suddenly gave in and started serving answers for queries I didn't ask just like Google but I'm not really sure.
I cannot explain it, hopefully someone from DDG actually chimes in :-) If they just use the Bing API, how can their results be better than Bing? I suppose they also use other sources.
I’ve always wondered how the economics of DDG work out, considering they’re basically a proxy for Bing with a bunch of other scraped/API-based data sources they layer on top. Are they paying Bing per query? How can that net out positively?
I suppose at their volume they’ve negotiated great API rates, but their own ads can’t possibly bring in enough revenue to cover the expenses of the API calls…
DDG is Bing, they use its API to get the search results. They augment it with other sources to provide the "value added" part, but that's a tiny part. DDG doesn't want you to know that it is Bing, but Bing is what it is.
But none of your personal details are sent to Bing? Sure they get some SERPS from them, but DDG abstracts in front of Bing's API using your query without passing your data.
I mean the !g bang - DDG has the option of getting results from Google and Bing. Bing offers an API for $6/10000 queries, but Google does not - I'm curious how they have access to Google search results.
DDG is essentially Bing made more private, with a little Yandex. I use it, because I like the privacy, but I don't think they deserve the credit for search result quality.
The source of results is irrelevant. Pagerank based revenue model and how they prioritize relevancy (e.g.: programming related query will have the top stackoveflow answer on the first page and their bangs) is why I like them in addition to their privacy promises. Ddg is still very simple,especially their /lite search. Google is cluttered and weighty but I still need it for some results. Bing results are often different than ddg for me as well.
I thought that DDG is effectively a (privacy-preserving) front-end on Bing, so it makes sense that Bing would give the same or similar results. (Maybe they're doing some of their own indexing these days? I haven't been paying close attention.)
As someone who used to do a decent amount of web and search engine results scraping in a past life, one thing I’ve never understood about DDG is how on earth this setup is economical. If they’re hitting (presumably) bing’s api a few billion times a month, surely they’re paying a lot of cash to do that, even at a heavily negotiated rate.
Also, so many folks here are saying they use the bang option to search Google, through DDG. So either they’re using google’s search api or scraping on the background, both of which are expensive in their own ways.
Beyond technical, at a business level, how are they actually pulling this off?
1) The results I get in DDG are the same results I get in Bing - which means that DDG is for me just a shell around Bing. And even though DDG is not sending to Bing any cookies with my ID, well, being a power user I can and do use the Incognito/Private mode of my browser. Furthermore, your interests can function like a digital fingerprint, so if Google or Microsoft want to identify you without any cookie whatsoever, they can and DDG does not help.
And the bang shortcuts of DDG are also provided by my browser. I mean, if I'm concerned with privacy, why in the world would I want to send my Google searches to DDG's servers?
2) People saying that DDG's search results are just as good are probably living in the US. Outside of the US, like in Europe, non-Google search results get to be like really, really bad ;-)
I always thought that services like Startpage or DDG paid for access to search databases, it maybe some form of revenue sharing. It's not that they're stealing the search results from Bing or Google and repackage them.
my experience using DDG is that its simply returning the same results as Bing. Is the only value they bring that one trusts them more with our data than microsoft?
I'm still puzzled how they get so extremely much better results compared to using any of thise directly or using DDG which does the same only with Bing.
Also a bit worried because I think there was a time when DDG felt the same before they suddenly gave in and started serving answers for queries I didn't ask just like Google but I'm not really sure.
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