What is the revenue generation model for DuckDuckGo?
quora.com
quora.com
This keyword-based advertising is our primary business model.
The rest of the post is a rant about user tracking.
I personally found his argument so persuasive I intend to set everything to DuckDuckGo again now.
Biggest differences to me is that Google seems to handle natural questions like "how do i..." in a "smart" way whereas ddg seems to be more altavista like in that your keywords have higher weight rather than trying to outsmart you. Another difference is that Google is much better on local search thanks to its strong bonds with Google maps, like checking opening hours. For anything not maps related DDG has been my default for can't even remember how many years, over 5.
There are a bunch of these. !a forwards to Amazon, !w to Wikipedia, etc.
But I agree. I check on DuckDuckGo, if I can't find what I'm looking for, most of the time, adding !s finds it. If not, I go back and switching to !g.
It's the opposite for me. I use primarily google, but when the results suck (which is quite often), I switch to duckduckgo to obtain a sensible search.
Often with technical searches the DDG results seem better.
As to rerun the query, that's what the back button is for. Simply hit back, add your bang and enter. Most browsers keep that page in cache so going back is pretty quick.
Sometimes the posts are blatant ads that don't really answer the question, or they add nothing that was not already answered. But sometimes they do answer the question and provide value, while also subtly pointing to a product. I think the latter is acceptable, and I do it occasionally myself. (Example: https://www.quora.com/What-kinds-of-lights-are-best-to-comba...)
Consider this: founders have the strongest conviction for solving a given problem. They often created a product because they saw a gap in the market, and they tend to be domain experts. So, they are highly qualified to answer questions within their area of expertise.
If a post provides value and just so happens to offer a relevant solution with financial strings attached, I have absolutely no problem with it. I might even end up purchasing it, because by searching or asking questions on Quora, I am looking for a solution myself.
edit: And I still do not understand the relation to a search engine :)
The thing is that people (including those who don't use DDG) remember "the goofy-looking duck". DuckDuckGo would be extremely foolish to throw away the mind share they built so far.
Besides, for whatever it's worth, I happen to like the name and logo. I think it's very memorable and has character unlike generic startup name #13.
I understand how DDG has to say this is the best and smartest way to do things because they have to live with their promise of not creeping on their visitors - so they can't use the same analytics that someone like Google has. It's just marketing.
But the ads that go to the top should be the most valuable, not necessarily go to the buyer with the deepest pockets.
I suppose you could say "car" ads cost $x per click, and then let all advertisers rotate, but that's not helpful either. You could measure which one gets clicked the most and have it move to the top, but that can be gamed. If you had any way of knowing how long someone spends on the advertised websites, or base it off of social media reviews or allow consumers with verified accounts to rate ads, that might work better.
I don't know, I just can't trust an ad format where I know the top click just spends the most money.
Why? That's exactly how it works every where else: Radio, TV, Billboards. If two people want the same spot, the person who ponies up more money gets the spot.
It is my understanding that similar to Google, the first couple of links might be ads, but the rest are organic.
I just did a search for a movie I like - To the right is an infobox with a blurb from Wikipedia + links to rotten tomatoes and IMDB. Under it is an amazon ad to buy a copy.
The top 5 links are IMDB, Rotten Tomatoes, a definition of the word, and a trailer.
Seems pretty unobtrusive and on point to me. If I wanted to buy a blu-ray of the movie I'd probably click that ad.
- CPM: you pay per impression (ie how often the ad is seen)
- CPC: cost per click. You only pay when the user clicks.
- CPA: you only pay when the user clicks and does something (eg buys something)
Display advertising (putting ads on third-party websites eg AdSense) is primarily CPM. Search advertising is primarily CPC (or at least this is how Google operates; I assume DDG is similar).
It's important to understand the implications of this.
In a CPC model the system that selects what ads to show you is doing so to maximize revenue. Since they only make revenue when you click a lot of effort is spent in determining the predicted CTR (click through rate) because:
Revenue = # of impressions x pCTR
So it's not just a question of who pays the most for an ad (that's how display advertising works largely) because a $1 CPC with 1% CTR earns more revenue than a $10 CPC with 0.01% CTR.
This is why I have less problem with the CPC search advertising model than pretty much any other model because your interests and the interests of the search engine are largely aligned. You want the results that are most relevant to you and that might be an organic search result or an ad. As long as the ads are clearly display as such, it's fine.
Also with search there is intent. You've searched for something so there's something you want. Who's to say an ad won't be the most relevant result?
The M in CPM is the Roman numeral for 1000. It's an archaic term, and should be replaced with the SI unit for 1000. Though coining the phrase "kilo-impression" would be a stretch.
This has been my main criticism of Google's direction the last 15 years or so. Seems like search results use to populate handsomely with personal sites and blogs run by hobbyists uninterested in extracting a dollar from the visitor. If the search results could return either (a) a link to a book sold on Amazon or (b) some Phd's site discussing the topic it seems likely that (a) wins and (b) gets buried somewhere on page 2.
Why? I'm not using DDG for the advertisements. I'm using them for search.
> I just can't trust an ad format where I know the top click just spends the most money.
This seems orthogonal to whether the actual target is a keyword or user-tracked data. If two firms want to target the same demographic (e.g., Ford and Chevy want to target 20-something Dodge Ram owners who search for 'truck'), something has to decide which advertisements to display on top.
I know a lot of the big-money keywords used to be things like lead-gen arbitrage in the legal and financial sector. If someone is searching for "life insurance quotes" and they see that the top advertiser is some comparison-shopping site paying $50 per click, will they still think of them as an unbiased referral service, or someone who has to bury that $50 cost somewhere?
You end up showing the ad that maximizes something like bid * click_rate + quality_score * quality_value. quality_value can be tweaked to change the balance between short-term revenue and ad quality.
That's the point of a search engine. If you show those as ads, you'd just be duplicating the top search results every time.
Retargeting is a popular model for advertising companies, where the retargeting follows you around the internet. Retargeting is much less valuable if you are just a search company.
Almost. There's also:
> "The only other way we’ve found so far, which currently accounts for a much smaller portion of our revenue, is non-tracking affiliate partnerships with Amazon and eBay.
> "When you visit those sites through DuckDuckGo, including when using !bangs, and subsequently make a purchase, we receive a small commission. This mechanism operates anonymously and there is no personally identifiable information exchanged between us and Amazon or eBay.
Can we add to his list:
> Offer a paid option such that consumers who want to pay for privacy / less ads / no ads can.
> Along with a paid option, companies should develop partnerships with like minded peers.
For example, DDG could pair with various VPN providers and the DDG paid tier could included "free" with your VPN fee. That is, one payment, not two, two related services.
The problem is that the customers with disposable income to pay to see no ads are exactly the people that admen want to reach. So it's unlikely that any ad-supported company will offer this. It would be as good as admitting to their real customers that their inventory (i.e. us) was of "low quality".
Having a no-ad tier means you can reasonably argue that those getting ads have opted into them, and thus are more valuable to the advertisers.
I figured at some point Facebook would see that I don't want to see them, and cease wasting advertisers money on me, but I suppose Facebook doesn't really care who it shows its ads to, as long as the advertisers already paid. I don't understand why advertisers keep paying, though.
I've pushed for this for a long time. Google and Facebook could do this. An annual fee tied to whatever minimum amount they make per user in ads makes all their services private for that user. They can even run the same stacks on different machines stored in different DB's for further isolation. Won't cost them much of anything extra given their existing datacenters and management software. Drop in the bucket. Might also have benefit of a sure thing vs advertisers whims.
That would take us back to a clear choice for consumers of being the customer or the product. We could vote with our wallet. I'm sure most would vote to be the product but the number of paying customers (esp businesses) should be significant.
The question is then, how far can you go by using the information available only in the user's HTTP request? Can you use the user's OS and device information? Where is the line exactly that DDG doesn't want to cross?
Edit: I just realized that the answer is probably: yes DDG can use all available information to improve targeting, but it won't store it.
Is this referring to Google Analytics? If so, I feel like "Google deploys" isn't quite fair compared to "Google's tracker is deployed" or something to that effect. But in any case, the phrasing is confusing enough to me to post here, since I want to know if it means something other than GA, which I understand and can block with uMatrix.
Also, may be he's speaking it just for the sake of promotion and doesn't take it too seriously himself, but the quality of search results can definitely be greatly improved when you know more about a person than just their search keywords (or even their country). If he actually believes what he says on Quora, I won't place my bet on his business doing too great in the future.
1. The first example (what he writes in his answer) - when I type "dishwasher" in DDG, every shopping website it lists on the first page is from USA, and I don't even live in the same continent. Even when I enable my country results through the button shown on top of the page, the shopping websites are not even the top ones in my country. When I type that in Google, it lists not only the top e-sellers in the country, the most popular local stores in my area as well. What will the advertisers achieve when they don't even know which place I live in? Who will sell me that dishwasher?
2. When I type Zoo, it's pretty damn clear I want to search a zoo in my area. DDG's results even when country is enabled are plain stupid. Write in Google, and it tells me exactly what I want to know.
3. When I type 'Jaguar' in the search box, all top link results are of the Jaguar car, but all the top image results are the Jaguar animal. Google is much more consistent here.
I can give tens of examples of why personalization of search results is not that bad an idea for the value it adds. Of course, there are very important negative side effects to it, and that's why we have DDG. But I would have respected his opinion much more had he acknowledged that personalization of search results adds a great value, but also has other consequences, like any balanced personal who can see both sides of a coin.
Searching for dishwasher on DDG gives Currys, John Lewis, Argos, appliancesdirect, and ao.com. All of those are UK based, exactly what I would expect
Searching google.co.uk gives Currys, BestBuy (which gives a choice between CA, US, MX), Lowes (US), Home Depot Canada, Home Depot U.S.
DDG is far better
When I search for Zoo on DDG, I get IMDB about a TV series, Chester Zoo (UK's most visited), London Zoo, and Wiki about the tv series. On Google.co.uk I get stuff about the TV series, Nairobi national park, and then stuff about Boston USA, Berlin, and Madrid.
DDG is far better.
P.S. : Had DDG been far better, they wouldn't need those Google Bangs that many users praising DDG keep finding themselves going back to.
dishwasher on google brings up argos, john lewis and a bunch of shops near me. on ddg it’s US only.
zoo brings up the nearest zoos around me as well as a bunch of other uk zoos. ddg is again US.
ddg doesn’t even know my location!
and this is, from my understanding, one of the reasons people are using ddg in the first place. and the reason i avoid going ddg. i need context aka state that’s already on their servers; instead of mentioning state each time (i’m in london and searching for vs just searching for)
These Q&A things on Quora are getting ridiculous. Without all the fluff that thing would condense to one sentence: We make money by context search ads and affiliate commission on !bang searches.
The thing that I thought made Google even better (back in the 200xs) was that Google did no advertising for their service. People just recommended their service because it was so useful and good. DDG can't live up to that standard and so they have to highlight their built-in privacy whenever possible. It's like everything they offer, they rub it in your face. It feels like they don't care about the search problem but only about being so much more privacy-focused than Google.
I can switch to StartPage and have Google + Privacy, with DDG it is just privacy without any good search results.
In this case, DDG asks users to have "faith" that their privacy is indeed being respected.
It isn't a too wide far-fetched that DDG could be collecting all data in silence and once they have enough of it (or are big enough to survive losing a part of their user base) start capitalising off of it.
I don't trust DDG any more than I do trust Google. In fact I trust Google with their boatloads of great engineers (of which we have learned that they do have some sense of moral and ethics) more than a small company that could easily be forced to capitalise on their user-data because of their shallow pockets.
Yeah, maybe it could have been a one-liner instead of a marketing blog post, but you can't have everything.
It was about doing things that are magical enough to make users happy, and just magical enough to not be creepy.
Almost looks like he’s accusing Eric of claiming Google wants to be as unscrupulous in the way they operate as possible without being caught
They also have deployed a hugely broken ip management system on youtube, and of course (like everyone else) they use workers on short term contracts to moderate all the violent shit that gets posted with little regard for the psychological impact on their workers of reviewing if something is child porn all day.
He wasn’t talking about general Google policy.
Eric has said in public it is official Google policy to walk right up to the "creepy" line, so the accusation is not unwarranted given that google operates worldwide, and not every country has the same views on privacy as Americans.
https://www.businessinsider.com/eric-schmidt-googles-policy-...
The context of the quote was medical implants in brains and his words were
“Our policy on a lot of these things is to get up to the creepy line and not cross it [and that would cross it]”
What he was clearly referring to is advanced tech projects, not general policy.
It sounds like a play on the old any sufficiently advanced technology resembling magic line, and is completely harmless...
Until you start taking it out of context and ignoring some of the words he said.
For the record: by policy, or by design?