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Comment by twblalock | Hacker News Reader

> I like DuckDuckGo. But unless they build their own search - I think the fundamental problem has not been tackled. There is no good, independent, private search alternative.

There isn't going to be, because it's really hard and expensive to do that. I don't see how any startup could even begin to compete with their own search engine.

The barrier to entry is extremely high: Bing probably would not have survived long enough to be profitable if it had been a startup. Microsoft put a lot of money into building it.

Subscriptions and micropayments would not be a solution for DDG because too few people would be willing to pay. Ad revenue is the only model that has sustained search engines in the long term.

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I see crawls from DuckDuckGoBot so chances are they're trying.

It would be quite easy to only index Reddit and StackOverflow.

Respectfully, I think you are definitely overestimating the cost of building a search engine. Do you have experience in search specifically? Asking in good faith here.

I think you're absolutely right that it's not trivial, but it isn't a completely unsolvable problem only addressable by the major spyware corporations like Facebook, Google, etc. I think you could build a decent search engine in about 6-18 months if all living expenses were paid and you could just lock yourself into your apartment with no distractions, with maybe a team of 1-3 other extremely talented engineers.

Wouldn't there be a ton of search startups if it were actually this easy?

The only honest answer to that question depends entirely on one's interpretation of the strong efficient market hypothesis.

I think competing with Google would actually be a more difficult problem

It's not so much the difficulty, though yes it is hard, but it's generally extremely difficult to raise capital as a late entrant into an established industry. Unless there's something disruptive. That said, it doesn't take that much capital to build a new search engine with today's computing infrastructure so a few have tried over the past 5-10 years but none were as good as Google (a minimal benchmark). They found a lot of initial interest then died out quickly (sorry I'm forgetting the names, maybe Powerset, Blekko and another). Without doing any "heavy lifting" and also thus not requiring much capital, these so-called "private" search engines have gotten some traction.

You will need data on relevant results for a broad swath of queries to fine tune your ranking models against, and will need to spend millions on infrastructure just to crawl and store an index of the entire web.

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