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Comment by jpm_sd | Hacker News Reader

> DuckDuckGo is small, but it’s growing 50% year-over-year. As of last week, it is also a search option on every European Android device. If the growth rate were to double, DDG would surpass Google in 6 years.

That's what we call a "Big If". And doesn't DDG just rent someone else's index?

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Yeah, search results are provided by Bing.

Wow, I didn't know that. So what exactly is a DDG then? Just a page to query Bing (anonymously?)? They don't crawl any data themselves?

Yep. They do a small amount of crawling solely to populate their "instant answers" for limited topics.

Their marketing and brand are the most important aspects. Bing proxies are a-dime-a-dozen but only DuckDuckGo has achieved tremendous media attention and funding.

Their marketing got me. I was duped.

One of the proxies had to win out, right? We're only talking about DuckDuckGo and not BearBearClaw because they survived. I don't think they're doing anything particularly special. They're also a much older company with a lot smaller search volume than people realize.

So I could just make a DDG?

You sure could. But DDG is a decade old company and its total lifetime searches amount to less than a week's worth of Google searches so it's likely your efforts will be in vain.

If you are willing to spend a decade marketing privacy features and bashing the establishment, yes. They are not Google-style "tech disrupters". One could say their success is as much a product of Edward Snowden's revelations and the subsequent societal shift towards tracking-as-a-liability as much as actual technology. Don't get me wrong, their UI gimmicks like !g are nothing to be scoffed at. UI has value, just ask Robinhood and Stripe. But DuckDuckGo is certainly not "hard tech".

I don’t think GP’s claim is entirely accurate. Bing is an input into the results, along with other inputs (Bing is less than majority responsible in most cases iirc). I don’t remember if DDG does any indexing on it’s own.

Hopefully someone more informed can chime in but GP’s claim was strong, provocative, and to my knowledge inaccurate so wanted to correct it.

yes DDG is a 'metacrawler' (for you old timers out there); it uses approximately 100 search sources:

https://web.archive.org/web/20150124074006/https://duck.co/h...

Wow, this is news to me.

"So, what exactly is it you'd say you do around here?"

So -- What is DDG's value to me, as I have switched over to Brave Browser+DDG+protonMail for as much of everything I can.

(Also of note, there are sites that do NOT accept @protonmail as a valid email address :-/)

They have their own crawler they mention, they mention Bing as a source, but I think that's mostly for search ads.

DDG uses a lot of different sources- https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/so...

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