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Comment by wegs | Hacker News Reader

DuckDuckGo has 50-100 employees, according to CrunchBase, while Google has over 100,000 employees. The exact numbers are irrelevant, but Google has around three orders of magnitude more employees than DDG.

a) DDG needs about 1/1000th the revenue of Google to survive at its current scale.

b) Software quality does not scale linearly with manpower. A 50-100 person team can do /almost/ as well as a 10,000 person team in the same domain. You spend a lot to go from 90% to 99% or 99% to 99.9%.

c) Unsurprisingly, I find DDG's search results good enough. I rarely go to Google, and only when DDG fails me.

d) If DDG can't target advertising as well as Google, they'll still have enough revenue to survive at their current level of quality. Their CPM is likely lower than Google's with less data and optimization, but I'd guess at worst 2x lower, not 1000x lower.

I'm glad they're doing well. On paper, it seems like a sound business model, and it's a heck of a lot more customer-friendly.

Curiously, I'd say 90% of the time I use Google is for math. If I'm typing a complex math expression (especially with units), Google tends to do much better than DDG.

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When I switched to DDG, I was happier with it than with Google. To me, DDG feels like Google felt ten years ago, before it was infested with "AI." Today, Google search results look more like the invasive shopping mall ads in Minority Report, tailored to what it thinks I'll click on, rather than relevant results based on my query. I only rarely (~once a month) have to use Google search to find something that DDG just cannot, and usually this is some highly technical topic. (I did it yesterday because I couldn't find information about a strange, fatal regex error in Firefox - seriously, one regex that Firefox can't understand prevents script execution, even when wrapped in exception handlers.)

I think Google has hit some sort of inflection point where their further attempts to improve search have made it a less useful experience and are mainly in service of their dual corporate mandate to put al ads in front of all eyeballs and control all access to all information.

Even DuckDuckGo is becoming more like Google in it's uselessness. I think the problem stems from the idea that new is always better, so all search platforms become infested with garbage sites that are automatically generated to capitalize on the current search patterns.

For instance, I was feeling nostalgic and wanted to look at the Space Jam website last night, but I couldn't remember the URL, so I searched for "space jam". The first page was all garbage results about a potential Space Jam 2. Okay, that's generating a lot of buzz, I get it. So I searched for "space jam website". The results were hundreds of identical culture blogs talking about the website. Nowhere was the link to the actual website, which turned out to be spacejam.com by the way (I thought it was warnerbros.com/archive or something...)

Same thing with other search terms. I've been playing a lot of Animal Crossing lately. I remember a time when you could search for a topic about a video game and find a website answering the question, or a forum post with relevant information. Now all you get are blogs posted by people who clearly don't have English as their first language, and likely have not played the game. It's keyword blogs and fandom.com/wikia all the way down,

>I think the problem stems from the idea that new is always better...

This is definitely one of the curses of the tech/software industry and we keep cycling through certain phases, it seems, building nearly unmanagable complexity in the process.

> When I switched to DDG, I was happier with it than with Google.

I regularly do !g, but I think the thing that is reducing that fastest is the declining quality of Google results. If I search for ‘x, y and z’, I then see a load of results with small text underneath saying ‘include z?’. It drives me demented, why wouldn’t I want to include my search terms?

> It drives me demented, why wouldn’t I want to include my search terms?

Well, I think the answer to your question is Google is trying to be friendly to the layman. It's not hard to think of examples where the user inputs a something into the search box that a CS major knows will not result in the implied wants of the user. Google tries to do a lot of human to machine translation work, and I think you're seeing the result of it. That being said, you can use quotations to explicitly include terms.

This works for the masses, but in my experience when machines force a use case, it causes more headache than not cause I'm not like the masses.

A barely related side rant: my microwave decided it wants to error out when it thinks you're trying to microwave air. i have a bowl in there. stop telling me to open the door to put something in. Whatever engineer at GE thought they would be smarter than the user, you're one of the many reasons your company is going out of business.

I think that it's O.K. when a user interface which issues a warning when it detects a dangerous condition.

The problem is when the warning is a "stop" and it doesn't have an override "I know what I'm doing".

We have the same microwave.

I also hate that "feature".

Google no longer fully respects quotations. It will still attempt to "correct" the quoted text, and may ignore some terms from it.

> I regularly do !g, but I think the thing that is reducing that fastest is the declining quality of Google results

I don't know how I feel about it, but I feel like this has happened in multiple places now: The dominant option is losing ground to competitors, not because they got better, but because the dominant option got worse. I've similarly argued that the Linux Desktop is now at least as good as Windows (and possibly MacOS), not because our UIs suddenly got more friendly (although they have improved), but because Microsoft shipped the Windows 8 ("who needs the start menu?") and 10 ("we'll merge the old and new control panels any day^wyear^wdecade now") interfaces, so the bar is so much lower. I don't know that this is progress, but it's great if you want FOSS to win. Likewise, it sucks that Google is getting worse, but hey, at least now there's less reason not to use DDG...

Not to delegitemize your use of `!g`, but I'm sure I'm not the only one who never needs to use that, and if that's true, I think we need to hear more from the people who are perfectly happy with DDG by itself.

Who else here doesn't use !g?

Same. I've been using DDG regularly since.. I don't know, 2013 maybe. (iOS 8 added DDG as a choice for a default search engine; that was at the end of 2014, and I had already been using DDG for quite awhile when that happened.)

It's been a long time since I used !g for anything. I did for awhile as an alternate search, but eventually it stopped being helpful -- if I didn't find any good results in DDG, then the Google results didn't help either. At this point it's probably been a couple years since I did a !g for anything.

I'm sure I used it once when I was trying out the bang commands. After that, I don't think I have. It just hasn't been necessary to find what I need.

Probably 3/4s of the time that I use !g on DDG, it's because I need location to be a component of my search. Like trying to find a plumber.

If DDG has an flag to use location info for search relevance, I'd do that instead.

If you regularly use !g, then why don't you just use Google? Serious question. It seems like if you are resorting to Google enough, there's almost no point for you to be using DDG.

I'd say I need to use it for less than 5% of queries. And often those 5% aren't solved by Google either because they're just hard to search for stuff or my original query wasn't good enough.

I do regularly use other Google search services, though. In particular, Google Books.

Google Books is still pretty decent, although I wish they still were scanning old books. I think they discontinued that.

Regularly yes, but it’s a small portion of my searches. Google as a company is something I want to avoid.

I like to use !s instead so it will leverage Startpage as a proxy for Google searches. Same results, but at least I can try to hide in a crowd.

I find it depends on how much I know what I'm looking for. If I know exactly what I'm trying to get to, google will usually get me there faster. If I don't, DDG is usually a good place to start, as it's less festooned with SEO'd garbage sites. And, worst case, there's always !g.

This is basically exactly my experience. Google's index is much more current and contains more obscure content. When I know exactly what I'm looking for but forgot the exact name or something like that, Google's fancy AI really helps. For more general queries, DDG is sometimes better.

I'd like to prefer DDG...

but recently I noticed what seem to be blind spots on many (maybe less popular?) topics. e.g. I can't find how to setup/configure borgbackup on nixos via ddg for any of ~3-5 query variations I tried. For non-logged-in google with uBlock the relevant documentation is the first hit.

I used to try DDG a few years ago but eventually switched back to Google as default. Now I have it again as default since a year. Not sure when or how it happened but since a few months, I almost exclusively use DDG, switching to Google maybe once a week. Indeed that's then usually for niche topics. On the other hand I think my search and surfing behaviour also changed. I'm starting to rely more on Bookmarks again; also I'm actually reading websites again and browse through them instead of just CTRL+F-skimming through them...

I find this with specific, niche technical questions too.

Duckduckgo results are from bing via bing api so you are essentially saying that you like bing results more than google results.

Per https://help.duckduckgo.com/results/sources/, "...DuckDuckGo gets its results from over four hundred sources. These include hundreds of vertical sources delivering niche Instant Answers, DuckDuckBot (our crawler) and crowd-sourced sites (like Wikipedia, stored in our answer indexes). We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we also source from multiple partners, though most commonly from Bing (and none from Google)."

So yes, while they do get results from Bing, it's a bit disingenuous to say that DuckDuckGo is just Bing.

That page basically confirms this. It says:

> 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.

The page I linked above doesn't mention DuckDuckHack. Are you quoting that from a different source? It does mention DuckDuckBot which is their own web crawler.

https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/du...

Hey cool, then that page changed recently. I hadn't heard of duckduckbot, that's exciting!

Same! I knew about duckduckhack, but that it had been put in "maintenance mode" a couple years ago, but wasn't aware that DDG had started operating their own crawler. It's exciting to see--I'm hopeful they'll be able to leverage it to improve their result quality and capabilities while staying privacy-friendly.

They have been crawling for a while and AFAIK the data is used at their instant answers, not on search results.

Not necessarily - I would imagine many searches directly using Bing would return some form of "personalization" extending past the search terms itself. Duckduckgo claims not to consider this AFAIK. Although maybe the same supposed benefits of a search based purely on query could be achieved by a Bing or Google search without cookies.

Is that really all there is to it? Present results from Bing, and done?

If you exclude Instant Answers and widgets then pretty much, but the important thing is that they don't send your PII to Bing. Not saying that sarcastically. For me it doesn't matter what the underlying data source is.

Can we please stop this meme? Every thread about DDG invariably seems to bring up this (false) statement.

How is it false? It literally says all traditional links are mostly from Bing: "We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we also source from multiple partners, though most commonly from Bing (and none from Google)."

All the other 400 sources and their own crawler are just used for Instant Answers and widgets.

It's the truth. I'm sure representatives of DDG can correct us if this is not the case.

However they have never done so.

It's funny, the first time I tried to switch to DDG, I couldn't make it stick. I eventually realized it was because I was frustrated by the lack of sports reporting carousels, which is admittedly a very silly reason.

I simply changed my behavior to use a sports website directly for those queries, and DDG has been totally sufficient for everything else.

Parts of DuckDuckGo are open source, so you might be able add your own sports results to their "zero click answers": https://github.com/duckduckgo/zeroclickinfo-goodies

I like the idea of contributing to DDG but that repo doesn't seem to be in active development.

If anyone knows of other ways to contribute code to DDG I (and probably others) would be interested.

Nevermind, it's deprecated. :(

it was the same for me, now I directly type !g whatever and get to them on google. It's good enough.

Did that a lot, but honestly, these days I find google unusable. The add section at the top seems to be steadily creeping down, replacing more and more actual search results; googles attempt to remove URLs from the web annoys me to no end because I often go by URI more than by title and the fact that DDG has the sites favicon next to the URI oh boy that's a useful feature. In fact, I'd say favicons are what I go for 80% of the time; and using google I just feel like I'm completely blind. The additional clutter (top stories, twitter links, etc.) only make it even harder to visually parse what I want.

And then there's DDGs option to quickly switch to results in germany and back to international, depending on what I need.

Interesting, I don't think I've seen an ad on Google (or anywhere, really) in years. I've been using uBlock Origin on desktop and mobile (Kiwi Browser on Android, as well as AdGuard).

I only have uMatrix, which blocks most annoying iframe ads, but doesn't target things like googles ad results which are part of the page itself. Googles ads are actually quite nice in that they aren't flashy images, but they do appear like normal search results. It's the same for DDG, but there the ads have a big "AD" in a box behind the title; meanwhile in google it's way harder to visually parse what you want to click on.

You should definitely use uBlock Origin as well then, as it completely blocks all search ads.

Not to splice hair, but Google isn't just "surviving", so the amount needed for DDG to survive is probably even smaller than that. They don't need to be as profitable as Google Search (which is much more profitable than the company as a whole) to do well.

Google is not only massively profitable, they’re also running a ton of loss leading services designed to feed more data into the machine, like Gmail, as well as a ton of other experimental ventures that DDG isn’t doing.

Google is also headquartered in some of the most expensive real estate in America, while DDG is in Pennsylvania. I’d bet that Google is paying a lot more in land cost per employee than DDG is.

I live near DDG HQ, it’s not even a whole building. It can’t be more than a handful of offices. DDG’s real estate expenses are essentially $0 compared to whatever Google is spending.

Not anymore. Ruth Porat has been Ruthlessly cutting all the "give back to mankind" projects, YouTube became profitable recently after TEN years of losses, and Google for work is now profitable which means Google drive and Google docs makes money, finally. when I worked on search for Google we had 700 people in a building that was probably 25000 square feet. It felt almost like a chicken farm. Not many people born in America worked there.

"Split hairs". If that's not... splitting hairs.

I prefer to splice them, personally, I like a challenge.

I think the numbers you put refer as Google as company (maybe more Alphabet) and not Google as search engine. I'm curious to know how many people actually works on Google Search Engine.

"Curiously, I'd say 90% of the time I use Google is for math. If I'm typing a complex math expression (especially with units), Google tends to do much better than DDG."

This is interesting because it highlights the changing expectation of web search engines from when they were just tools to find relevant webpages for a query.

Search engines have morphed into all-purpose utility and information tools. The bar for what makes a good search engine has been greatly moved forward. Organic web search results are now just one part of the measure of quality and relevance.

I wonder if that’s an OS specific thing. I find that nowadays I use Spotlight on OSX for math expressions, not Google.

How does it compare to Wolfram Alpha in your opinion?

I never use WA, but I'm typically reaching for fairly basic math calculations that don't involve units. Last example was calculating an estimate cost of DynamoDB based on the peak RPS I'd found, which is just basic math with a lot of significant digits.

Siri draws answers from Wolfram Alpha, so maybe Spotlight does, as well.

Spotlight uses a private framework for mathematical expressions called Calculate.framework. (Fun fact: it seems to be based on Bison.)

> Unsurprisingly, I find DDG's search results good enough. I rarely go to Google, and only when DDG fails me.

It might be helpful to point out that DDG (and other 'alternative' search engines such as Ecosia) get their search results from Bing.

DDG has its own index now, though it still augments that with other sources.

https://help.duckduckgo.com/results/sources/

Their own index is not used for any organic search results, only Instant Answers and other widget stuff. Money quote from your page:

> We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we also source from multiple partners, though most commonly from Bing (and none from Google).

I agree that quote is there (and have read the surrounding context), but it doesn't seem to me that it actually says that DuckDuckBot results aren't used in any non-Instant Answer search result, which I think is a distinction. They're very clearly synthesizing results from multiple sources, including many from Bing, but neither that page nor the DuckDuckBot-specific page seem to directly exclude the use of their internally-crawled results in the non-Instant Answers search results. Did I perhaps miss something?

You're right but at the same time they say that they source their "traditional links in the search results" from "multiple partners", which to me seems to imply that it's from partners only and not their own crawler.

Try searching for something random like "woxioai" on DDG and you will see that the search results are identical to Bing (albeit a slightly different order but I presume they do some internal sorting at least), while the search results are completely different on Google.

Does the DDG bot actually do a lot of crawling? I've never seen anyone talk about it except that it exists, while for Bingbot, Googlebot and random chinese bots in the webdev forums I go to people complain all the time about excessive crawling.

Why not just use Bing?

Also, how is this not a problem? If DDG ever becomes popular enough to be a threat, Bing just stops providing them search results.

Because Bing does what Google does, which is uses your search history to show you targeted ads. DuckDuckGo only shows keyword based ads, which aren't as effective but do not require building a persona of personal information to target.

It's totally a problem and disingenuous of the article to talk about the "Business Model" of DDG and not mention this.

I now realize that I have almost completely stopped using Google in it's most common setting. ie. just search for the thing you are looking for.

I use google almost exclusively to improve search on other websites or for special syntax based searches that are far easier to implement than good general purpose search.

Site:reddit.com , site:stackoverflow.com are my most common search queries. Otherwise, it use it to open Maps, YT, HN as a landing page. Research and news both are usually acquired from a curated list of sources I visit directly, with no involvement from google. If it is something specific then I will use "quotes" to find that exact thing. Outside that, google scholar and maps are amazing, but I don't think DDG is trying to compete there.

The idea of searching for something with only a vague sense of what it is, has almost completely stopped. For generic searches the 1st page results of medium pages and single pager MSM articles are both useless and shallow. It isn't Google's fault that popularity and quality are orthogonal to each other.

If I genuinely cared about my privacy, I would seriously consider trying DDG out. However, I have surrendered all my data to corporate overlords and don't think there is much point in struggling anymore.

> Site:reddit.com , site:stackoverflow.com are my most common search queries.

You could probably use bangs for that...

https://duckduckgo.com/bang?q=reddit

https://duckduckgo.com/bang?q=stackove

just prepend your searches with them, e.g. the following is equivalent to your SO search:

!sod something to search

I think your assessment of the shallowness of 1st page Google search results nowadays is spot-on. Anecdotally, I’ve noticed this situation get worse over the past ~5 years, to the point where I have to skip a few pages of search results and really dig deep to find high-quality content and writing.

Unfortunately, SEO sites like Medium that “democratize” writing seem to be a big contributor to this problem. The lowest common denominator there is not very high, yet shallow articles seem to get tons of exposure to search engines. Not to say there’s nothing good on Medium, I follow the people whose writing I like, and I like them quite a lot. It’s just lost in the noise.

I’m curious if you’ve found alternative sources (except HN, of course). Is DDG any higher quality?

I feel like the ideal for me would be something balanced between a search engine and content aggregator - I would like to search for what I want and get high quality results, but avoid the echo-chamber effect emerging from the use of upvotes as a ranking method as much as possible.

> b) Software quality does not scale linearly with manpower.

I believe there's a tipping point after which software quality doesn't scale at all; in fact, it only starts getting worse. People confuse quantity (roughly: number of features) for quality and they think they're improving quality by throwing more and more developers at it.

Software works differently to many other fields in that all devs need to keep lots of complicated technical context in their heads, which doesn't translate well to how managers experience scalability, as that field is just vastly different. It's also hard to explain to a non-programmer (or even an unexperienced programmer) that removing code is good and sometimes condensing two features into a simpler, more generic and versatile feature is positive both for code quality and usability; then again, from a marketting perspective, two specific features are better than one generic feature. And then you have ways in which more developers do get things done better, but only if managed correctly (aka. if the tasks are split along the right lines)

Yep, read Mythical Man Month

If you don't want to use Google even for math, I would suggest WolframAlpha[1]. It can be used for much more complicated equations/unit conversions etc.

[1] https://www.wolframalpha.com

> c) Unsurprisingly, I find DDG's search results good enough. I rarely go to Google, and only when DDG fails me.

Same, my problem is that whenever I search for something that isn't english DDG can't find even the most basic stuff. Aside from that the migration has been pretty painless for me though so I have my hopes up.

Have you set the localization to whatever language you are searching in? At least for German it has been working well that way IMO

I have no idea how I missed that! For those unaware there's a little toggle just beneath the search bar - and yes, it did improve the results! Thanks!

That has been one reason why I prefer DDG to google since day 1; I can tell it to give me stuff from my region, or just international. Considering I use the internet in english 98% of the time but occasionally need something specific to Germany, that's very useful indeed :D

Google used to have the same feature a long long time ago, in fact I'd have sworn that DDG copied it from google.

nice happy to hear that. You're welcome

Holy crap, missed by me too. It was set correctly but wasn’t turned on. Thanks.

I find myself throwing !g when I want to find a programming specific thing. Not sure this is because Google's results for niche tech sites is better or because I am more familiar with how to craft these as Google queries having used it almost exclusively since 1998.

I would bet part of it is the personalisation of results on google's side, I experience the same.

But do Google get to personalise it when it is a ddg !g search? I thought that went to Google via ddg?

Works fine with Russian. Shows "In partnership with Yandex" badge (Yandex is a major Russian search/email/etc company) in the corner on some searches. Whatever "partnership" means...

> A 50-100 person team can do /almost/ as well as a 10,000 person team in the same domain. You spend a lot to go from 90% to 99% or 99% to 99.9%.

I'm reminded of how AMD's graphics division is a fraction of the size of nVidia.

Search is not ten thousand it is not even a thousand people. People don't realize that Google is actually double click add engine plus a relatively small search team; not 50 but less than 1000.

I always found it weirdly honest that at every career fair all the Facebook and Google people were just working on ads.

What about their CPU division?

Interesting question, I'm afraid I don't know.

For doing math in DuckDuckGo, may I suggest adding !wa to the query, it will redirect the query to Wolfram Alpha and give you a better result. :)

Oddly, I don't find WA to be great. WA can do complex math, but it's slow. To give a good example of what I've come to expect from all three, type "2 feet + 2 meters" into:

* WA: You'll get a correct result, but it takes 4 seconds.

* Google: 0.185806 square meters, obviously (instantly)

* DDG: Search results

Curiously, I find Google's to be the most helpful. I see the obviously incorrect result and instantly fix it. DDG gives me nothing. WA is too slow to e.g. play around with numbers.

My last computation was trying to figure out which bolt to get for a hole (with McMaster's selections for both bolts and, at some level, holes). I was converting hole sizes / bolt sizes between metric and imperial, and between fraction and decimals, playing around until I found a combo which worked. Once I had Google giving the right answers, I could play around until it worked. With WA, I would have had to wait 4 seconds each time.

By the time I'm doing anything beyond that, it's generally in numpy. There isn't really a spot for WA in between.

"it's slow... it takes 4 seconds"

My, how far we've come.

  $ time units -v '2 feet + 2 meters' feet
        2 feet + 2 meters = 8.5616798 feet
        2 feet + 2 meters = (1 / 0.11679951) feet

  real    0m0.009s
  user    0m0.005s
  sys     0m0.004s

With the computational power available at our fingertips, one would hope so…

> Curiously, I'd say 90% of the time I use Google is for math. If I'm typing a complex math expression (especially with units), Google tends to do much better than DDG.

I used to use google for this too, until I discovered GNU units [1]. GNU units is vastly superior to Google for complex formula and runs quietly in my command line.

Some examples:

Q: What's 72°F in °C?

A: $ units "tempF(72)" "tempC"

22.2

Q: How many teaspoons are in a tablespoon?

A: $ units "1 tbsp" tsp

Q: What is the total energy content of 1 kg or uranium, burned completely in a breeder reactor?

A: $ units "1 kg /(238 g/mole) * 200 MeV * 6.022e23 / mole" "MW*days"

938 Megawatt-days

Q: How many femtobarns are in a square teraparsec?

A: $ units "teraparsec^2" "femtobarn"

9.5e99 (very close to a google)

Q: How many hectares are there in a baker's dozen of mm^2?

A: $ units "10 bakersdozen mm^2" "hectares"

1.3e-08

[1] https://www.gnu.org/software/units/manual/units.html

Just installed it. This is really cool! Thanks for enlightening.

DDG is good enough for me usually. I very rarely find myself using !g to go to google. Usually, when I do it's to see where my own sites rank on google. I do find google better at local search, which makes sense since they know more about me. Like if I want to look up my pharmacy's phone number. It's always the first result in google but I get mixed results from DDG. Overall, Duck is pretty good though.

Software is only part of a major search engine. Another part, no less costly is hardware. You need a lot and lot of computers to scrap and index the web. To be more specific, Google had 2.5 million computers back in 2016. Luckily, DDG doesn't need nor hardware nor much software, as they are mostly just intermediary between you and Bing.

> c) Unsurprisingly, I find DDG's search results good enough. I rarely go to Google, and only when DDG fails me.

I felt the same way for a while and even switched the default engine to DDG... but lately, I've stopped finding things and I was increasingly searching with "!g" to get something relevant, so I just switched back.

> c) Unsurprisingly, I find DDG's search results good enough. I rarely go to Google, and only when DDG fails me.

and this is where the !bang shortcuts are useful, and I like to think that DDG analyzes which requests were made with those bangs to hopefully refine and tune their systems to provide better results over time.

Funny you mention math. That's the one area where I ditch Google in favor of Wolfram Alpha.

do you find DDG slower to load than Google? I have a slow mobile data connection, and noticed that DDG was much slower to load than Google. not sure if it is a raw point of presence thing, or if my phone (android chrome) is cheating somehow to load Google faster.

Yes, I often miss being able to do "1 second / 2 MB in minutes / 1.2GB"

In reply to c: DDG doesn't do the search bits itself, it just uses Bing results.

That's what I had heard before, but I looked it up and it's not quite accurate. They do have their own crawler, and they pull from "400 different sources", Bing being one of the major ones. https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/so...

> "a) DDG needs about 1/1000th the revenue of Google to survive at its current scale."

I don't think evil or benevolence needs a threshold. Size of the company is absolutely irrelevant. Marketshare is absolutely irrelevant.

DDG's redeeming quality is that they've focused their entire identity on privacy. Should they fail at privacy, then a lot of their users will bail. On the other hand it's not like some open source app or distributed protocol that users can inspect. It's still proprietary technology using a centralized model and you have to trust their word for it.

And in fact, for me their small size is actually a red flag. This is because big companies are also big targets for law enforcement. The EU has been historically trigger happy when applying fines to big companies, since it provides a valuable source of income (I imagine). Google is in fact under a lot more scrutiny than DuckDuckGo or other smaller companies.

And you can see this for example when interacting with Google's platforms, Adwords / AdSense, versus other smaller players in the "real time bidding" space. Google exposes a lot less about the user's profile, they leak a lot less, leaving a lot less opportunity for building your own user profiles.

They have also been transparent with their users about what they collect, even before the GDPR forced companies in the EU to be transparent. You can also opt out of logging app activity and profiling. Or more recently you could opt for a deletion of your history every 3 months.

Of course, you could say that you don't trust Google to do that. That's fine. But why do you trust DuckDuckGo then? They survive, after all, with the same business model. They say they don't give out your searches and info to Bing Ads, but you basically have to trust their word for it.

And given Google's history, how seriously they've handled security, plus they've always projected a certain maturity in handling user data (compared with Facebook), it seems to me that we are in conspiracy theories land. I was a DDG user, but seeing anti-vaxxers in the news recently led me to the conclusion that on the topic of privacy, my views are not evidence based. And I'm going to guess that a lot of other privacy conscious people did fall into the same trap as I did.

Going forward, for me there's only one way to ensure privacy and that is via technology (end to end encryption, open source, etc). And if I have to trust service and app vendors, I first need to identify my threats. Whom am I afraid of? What am I protecting against? Yes, I still fear Google, but now that fear is very contextual and task driven.

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> "c) Unsurprisingly, I find DDG's search results good enough. I rarely go to Google, and only when DDG fails me."

DDG fails horribly for me on two kinds of searches:

1. local searches — it's completely useless for local searches — imagine that I'm in Romania and if I want Romanian results for "restaurants", DDG gives me results in Spanish, from freaking Spain

2. software development searches — I would have expected DDG to be better, with their integration with GitHub and StackOverflow but isn't. It's actually really really bad, many times completely ignoring my words, giving me results for words I did not type, so there's this annoying back and forth where I try refining my searches with extra words and syntax, to force it to search what I want; this rarely happens with Google and when it does, it's because there are no results available

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That said, I would like for DuckDuckGo to improve and I am glad to see them doing well, because I'm a firm believer in competition. I would not like for Google to remain the sole option available.

On the other hand I really hope they divorce themselves from Bing. If Bing goes offline, or if Microsoft closes their API, it might kill DuckDuckGo. They do have integrations with other sources and their own partial index, but AFAIK Bing is their main source, which makes them effectively a Bing shell.

This is also why your operating costs are misleading. Because it's not an apples to apples comparison. Maintaining your own web index, apparently, is not that cheap. If it were, they wouldn't be using Bing.

Google isn't standing still. They're getting worse over time. I've noticed a significant drop in their result quality even in the past 1-2 years. Meanwhile DDG seems to be slowly improving. They are now my default and I only go to Google if I can't find something with DDG.

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