"DuckDuckGo gets its results from over one hundred sources, including DuckDuckBot (our own crawler), crowd-sourced sites (like Wikipedia, which are stored in our own index), Yahoo! (through BOSS), Yandex, WolframAlpha, Yelp, and Bing."
I also don't see "we don't track" as a liability, given that Google themselves get relatively little by way of relevance from profiling (though it may contribute to ad sales). Rather (and this is straight from a Google engineer): "It's really hard to do much better in search advertising than current query + location."
DuckDuckGo's results are a compilation of "over 400" sources, including Yahoo! Search BOSS; Wikipedia; Wolfram Alpha; Bing; its own Web crawler (the DuckDuckBot); and others. It also uses data from crowdsourced sites, including Wikipedia, to populate "Zero-click Info" boxes – grey boxes above the results that display topic summaries and related topics.
Not sure about bing, but DuckDuckGo is basically Yahoo with the search spam filtered out. On heavily spammed searches DDG has become noticeably better, IMO.
I've been kicking the tires on DuckDuckGo for several months now, and while it is ever improving, Google's results are still more relevant.
Still, I totally think DDG is on Google's radar, and while CEO Eric Schmidt has stated Bing is their competition (and they are) they have to wonder about about DDG's logarithmic rise in popularity.
Isn't DuckDuckGo just a wrapper around Bing search results? I see lots of complaints about DDG search results but those complaints should be directed to Bing, not DDG.
(I understand that DDG does some value-add to the results returned by the Bing API).
I'm sorry but I have big problems with calling DDG a real search engine. Their page states "DuckDuckGo is a search engine like Google." BS. It's a meta search engine that relies on other real search engines, such as Bing, to get the results. If ever becomes a threat to Bing, they'll cut them off in a second. DDG doesn't do the hard and resource-intensive work of crawling and ranking the pages, they just tweak the results of others in ways that gets them publicity on tech blogs.
That statement isn't fully supported by the link you provided. It does however seem reasonable that DDG results are based in large part on Bing and Oath.
"In fact, DuckDuckGo gets its results from over four hundred sources. These include hundreds of vertical sources delivering niche Instant Answers, DuckDuckBot (our crawler) and crowd-sourced sites (like Wikipedia, stored in our answer indexes). We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we also source from a variety of partners, including Oath (formerly Yahoo) and Bing."
To my knowledge duck duck go uses Bing's search API to get their results. To me Bing and Google have not been sufficient for my searching needs and the needs of a large group around me for a long time now.
On a separate but related issue because DDG is using Bing the overall experience is lackluster, as other user's have noted
things like very slow to re-index new results, new information climbs up to the top very slowly and often times I have to switch off their search with a ! command to get my results because they just aren't working. But if I have to do that I'd rather be on that other search site entirely.
To be fair google also for the last few years has also started providing a very lack luster search experience and using dark patterns around their results to get you to click ads.
They all kind of suck.
My opinion is biased though because I'm currently working on a new search engine to solve these things.
Aside from a limited set of head queries where they've added their own custom stuff, DDG is a wrapper around Bing. The results are identical and any webmaster can tell you that Duckduckbot is not crawling the web like Google/Bing.
In the same way that "Google is an advertising company", I see DDG as a marketing company. They've done a good job marketing Bing results with a privacy wrapper. I recognize the value, but it's different from competing directly on search.
> 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).
Anyone can see this for themselves by comparing a number of Bing and DDG searches.
There's more to the services DDG offers than just private search via Bing. DDG has built its own technology around specific types of searches and queries. The main search product is powered by Bing, but it's not fair to say it's just "a Bing frontend".
> 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).
It is accurate to say DDG uses bing behind the scenes, but that is not its only source. They have their own crawler (DuckDuckBot[1]), and pull results from many sources[2].
"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 ?
Presumably you count DuckDuckGo as a "Bing syndicate". I think that doesn't do it justice - many of the things I like about DDG are specific to DDG, and I could not care less whether the underlying crawl was run by Bing or not.
"DuckDuckGo gets its results from over one hundred sources, including DuckDuckBot (our own crawler), crowd-sourced sites (like Wikipedia, which are stored in our own index), Yahoo! (through BOSS), Yandex, WolframAlpha, Yelp, and Bing."
I also don't see "we don't track" as a liability, given that Google themselves get relatively little by way of relevance from profiling (though it may contribute to ad sales). Rather (and this is straight from a Google engineer): "It's really hard to do much better in search advertising than current query + location."
https://plus.google.com/104092656004159577193/posts/HFT1emeF...
So: DDG gain a niche, possibly a large one, influence the marketplace, and lose very little in ad placement relevance.
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