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Comment by Matt_Cutts | Hacker News Reader

I know of a couple ways:

- 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...

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Wow, Matt, I'm not sure if I should be flattered or scared that you're paying this close attention to DuckDuckGo :).

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.

he's apparently used duckduckgo. i can recognize it from a mile away because the stalking/wow factor that all us users experience after using it seems to have also bit him. :)

Wouldn't this mean DDG is giving amazon information about it's users?

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.

No, we're not giving any more information than would otherwise flow by clicking on a link in the SERPs. And actually, we're giving less information than if you would click on the same result in Google because we're not sending your search terms via the referrer header. We've stayed away from things like commission junction because then you would be giving away information as it is routed through a third-party. For more info, see the privacy policy: http://duckduckgo.com/privacy.html. In the other direction, Amazon doesn't share any personal info.

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