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Comment by toyg | Hacker News Reader

I believe DDG used other solutions pre-Bing; it’s just that, after they switched to Bing, it seemed to work well enough that they kept it. Could they afford the hit in result quality resulting from switching away, if MS started playing rough? That’s a good question, but I’m sure the DDG folks have thought about it.

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Depends on the user I imagine. Most of my searches start on DDG and I just got used to expecting certain types of "human phrase searches" to be !g'd, or more recently for me, !s'd.

So if DDG degraded in quality I'd be fine, because I don't expect perfection. Though I suppose it depends on how much, of course.

I believe DDG used other solutions pre-Bing...

DDG used the Yahoo Boss API [0] originally. It was pretty good, but Yahoo shut it down and Bing now also powers their search engine.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Search_BOSS

Wasn't Yahoo! Bing powered at that time? :)

DDG launched in 2008, and according to the below, the deal between Yahoo and Microsoft didn't happen until 2009 at the earliest.

In July 2009, Microsoft and Yahoo! announced a deal in which Bing would power Yahoo! Search. All Yahoo! Search global customers and partners made the transition by early 2012. The deal was altered in 2015, meaning Yahoo! was only required to use Bing for a "majority" of searches.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/?curid=4325491

That’s not clear if DDG’s US and European results were using Bing or not in late 2009.

I know for sure people have said DDG is better over time. I can’t imagine it was very good in 2008 or 2009.

DDG was still working significantly with Yahoo! as late as 2016: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12013264 . The links are dead but you can desume from the conversation what it was about.

Note: I know Yahoo is Bing behind the scene - I'm just saying the technical implementation at the time was not tied exclusively to "bing.com".

Good point. Though my bigger point was that DDG has essentially always been dependent on Bing/Microsoft.

2016 is the year Yahoo was sold to Verizon. 2 years later, Verizon writes down $4.6B of the AOL Yahoo subsidiary. A year after that they sell Tumblr in a fire sale. Verizon stopped caring about their web media empire when they did the write down/sale too. Effectively throwing in the towel as a major web advertising hub even though they are likely still top 5 in the west after Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon. That’s peanuts to Verizon though.

I can’t imagine Verizon cares much about their deal with DDG. If Microsoft cared, it makes sense that they could have Verizon and Yahoo do what they want over lawsuit worries from DDG.

I’m being pedantic at this point and totally guessing with my assumptions. I admit the continuous praising of DDG on the web has gotten to me and likely making me feel and react this way.

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