I'm skeptical that they'll be successful, but I wish them the best. They should market (and engineer) strongly on privacy since that's where Google is weak.
Had to look that up. I found https://help.duckduckgo.com/results/sources/ Bing is just one of "hundreds of vertical sources delivering" results to DuckDuckGo.
> To do that, we've developed an open source Instant Answer platform called DuckDuckHack,
which links to https://duckduckhack.com/ which says "DuckDuckHack is now in Maintenance Mode".
And the "four hundred sources" link links to 400 special case replies. They are probably useful, but fire rarely. It's basically Bing, and that page is a bunch of spin.
[1] https://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/1107/1107.5728v2.pdf
I meant that if Microsoft launched a privacy-focused product and hid their involvement with it they would receive extremely negative publicity on the sort of websites people who use privacy-focused products read.
Completely leaving aside the harm that would cause to the Microsoft brand, it would also be completely useless. Essentially no one would switch from DDG to Microsoft's (hypothetical) shady clone.
Your hotel examples aren't relevant because people searching for hotels and people searching for private search engines don't evaluate details about corporate ownership the same.
We've gotten so far into unlikely hypotheticals I don't find this conversation interesting any more. I won't reply further in this chain. Have a nice day!
I have always thought DuckDuck were doing their own searches.
How can you build a privacy oriented search engine and still make money?
It might be worthwhile to do the search part in-house and outsource the question-answering functions. Wolfram Alpha and IBM Watson could be used for answering common questions.