Do you happen to know how DDG is making money, then?
- Adding affiliate codes to the search results: https://duckduckgo.com/privacy.html The relevant part is "we may add an affiliate code to some eCommerce sites (e.g. Amazon & eBay)". It looks like this is where most of the revenue comes from, according to http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2011/01/26/can-a-start-u... . Relevant part is "The site is self-funded and saw about $15,000 in revenue last year, mostly through Amazon’s affiliate program, which pays whenever a customer buys an Amazon product after clicking on a DuckDuckGo link."
- Sponsorships where the sponsor banner displays on all search result pages: http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/05/duck-duck-go-tra...
I love DDG, but this seems shady putting the affiliate code into search results. Amazon ranks great, but it seems this would encourage DDG to rank Amazon even higher. Google would get in quite a bit of trouble for doing this.
The $15,000 is less than my graduate school stipend was. Needless to say, we're not raking in the dough here.
I just added this to the FAQ, i.e. how do you make money (I don't see any ads)? We'd like to show minimal advertising and make the venture more sustainable, for sure, but haven't been able to find a good ad provider willing to work within the DDG privacy principles.