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Comment by tiffanyh | Hacker News Reader

Isn’t DDG just using Yahoo on the backend to perform the search (which in turn is using Bing)?

What prevents Yahoo from (a) offering a competitive search to DDG or (b) Yahoo from shutting of DDG from using its search engine?

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DDG is using over 400 sources apparently, of which one is Yahoo https://duck.co/help/results/sources

Most of those sources are search engines of some web pages, answer pages, cheat sheets and help documents. They even list tiny unit conversation services there. Give me a break.

They license both Yahoo and Yandex (Yandex being a massive index based in Russia).

> https://duck.co/help/results/sources "We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we source from Bing, Yahoo, and Yandex."

I thought they where re-implementing search.. Are they "just" aggregating?

I recently spoke with Gabriel and his view was that they're going to continue to outsource / proxy / aggregate unless they need to implement their own search. Right now it's not worth the investment apparently.

That seems reasonable if the goal is privacy, right?

I mean, even if they were literally proxying to anonymized Google results, wouldn't that cover the privacy benefit?

It would make it hard to pretend that the DDG results were much better than those irrelevant Google results that more fanatical Googlephobes insist they get.

Yeah because Search is an actual hard problem and putting up a proxy like DDG is not. DDG will never have any real value beyond that.

Eliminating tracking of your searches is not valuable?

I said value beyond that. That meaning the privacy proxy.

IDK, if it ain't broke don't fix it.

Also the system in place for aggregation isn't just Nginx, it actually does things, like bangs.

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