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Comment by marcell | Hacker News Reader

Is DuckDuckGo just a Bing UI? I thought they had their own index.

DDG USED to be Yahoo (which... Is just Bing results too. Yup I’m serious). There’s a bunch of alternative search engines that are UI’s on top of Yahoo/Bing. Ecosia is one of them too.

I’m pretty confused then. What’s the benefit of DDG over Bing? Is it just marketing?

they don't track you

What about Bing?

Doesn't see who makes the request.

DDG proxies it so bing doesn't know the IP or person originating it. So bing is simply paid for it by DDG.

- bangs (put g! or !g anywhere in your query to search on Google, !gem searches on rubygems etc)

- searching via POST requests (so that your searches are not saved in browser history)

- I heard many people like DDG's browser for iOS, as a dedicated incognito browser

> bangs (put g! or !g anywhere in your query to search on Google, !gem searches on rubygems etc)

Which you can do inside your browser too.

> searching via POST requests (so that your searches are not saved in browser history)

That's not a benefit to me.

If I want less browser history I'll handle that locally, thank you.

> I heard many people like DDG's browser for iOS, as a dedicated incognito browser

That's not a benefit of the site.

Better privacy and better infoboxes sometimes are what I would immediately list, but purely on features that's not very compelling.

However a lot of us find the privacy nice and it cuts down on google searches which is what a g! is. If you use that you just gave up your privacy, but it's nice to have alternatives. Not worrying about search history is also a great benefit for most of us as well. Good luck with your preferences though.

They have some extras built on top of it, but imo yeah mostly marketing. In general no one knows how their arrangement with Microsoft works, would be nice to hear the details.

While don't know how their arrangement with Microsoft works, anyone can pay for API based access to Bing.

Prices are here:

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/cognitive-...

They have ads revenue sharing agreement with Yahoo (essentially reselling Bing Ads) as well.

Little known fact: if you buy anything on Amazon, DuckDuckGo gets to know exactly (the precise item) you bought as part of the Amazon affiliate program.

> Little known fact: if you buy anything on Amazon, DuckDuckGo gets to know exactly (the precise item) you bought as part of the Amazon affiliate program.

This isn't specific to DuckDuckGo in any way whatsoever. This happens for ANY affiliate. I've used the Amazon affiliate program, and every month I would get reports of the exact items people were purchasing. I couldn't link those purchases to any particular individual, mind you, but I could see exact items.

But it violates DDG's primary business proposition of not tracking you.

Do they track people based on that?

They probably do have access if they wanted it but then they would be violating their TOS and spirit of their entire company by doing so. Whether you trust them or not is one thing but saying they do it is unfair and not called for.

The two that come to mind offhand:

Privacy. DDG at least claims to make it a first-class feature, and one would imagine that means that they're not selling you out when they pass the search along to Bing. Going directly to Microsoft may be OK. I haven't really bothered to look into it; I just went with my warm fuzzies. This is a spot where Microsoft has a checkered past, and it's going to take a bit more than the ill-fated "Scroogled" ad campaign to change minds there.

Cleaner UI. Bing's interface is relatively cluttered compared to DDG's. It loads all sorts of images, sticks a chumbox on the bottom of the home page, nags you to download Edge, etc. If I run a search, I have to often scroll through two entire screen heights of I-don't-know-what before I get to actual webpages. Lately, DDG has been adding clutter to their site as well, but there's still quite a lot less of it, and what there is tends to be less visually noisy.

It still baffles me that Microsoft still doesn’t get the value of clean UI. What are the designers there thinking?

Same with Windows Menu? WTF is cotton candy doing there on a fresh install ?

Why does opening Edge have so much msn news spam?

Like is Microsoft just oblivious to what the user really cares about ?

Most likely some execs compensation is tied to how many ads they shove so they prioritize that over the user’s experience.

Or more likely MS figured out they can make more money licensing Bing search to other search companies instead of trying to appeal directly to consumers.

Microsoft's behavior starts to make a lot more sense if you think of it as a large conglomerate of smaller organizations, each with its own agenda, and its own ways of throwing its weight around.

For a while, you could get away with interpreting Apple's behavior as if it were a single person with a coherent mind. Since 2011, though, that model's been getting less and less workable for Apple as well.

Only for their infoboxes. The organic results are just Bing.

That’s not true.

DDG has their own crawler and their results are a composite of many different sources of which Bing is one.

It’s easy enough to check. I searched my name on both DDG and Bing, the results are completely different.

While they do have a crawler (DuckDuckBot) they primarily rely on other search engines the main ones being Bing and Yandex.

The fact that they return different results doesn’t mean much, firstly the bing API and web search return slightly different results especially if you use some of the extended parameters, secondly it doesn’t mean that they return results without additional post processing since they can have their own weighting/pageranking algorithms, filters etc. on top of Bing.

DDG isn’t just a UI for Bing but their results rely on Bing.

I do believe your main point is correct, however your easy check doesn't prove it.

Even back when DDG did only use Bing/Yahoo data, you'd likely have seen different results for your name depending on what personalised results Bing/Yahoo might show you, or other aspects (such as weighting applied to your location).

> I searched my name on both DDG and Bing, the results are completely different.

Search for "what is my ip" and you will see Bing bot IP in the DDG snippets.

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

> To do that, 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).

In other words, their own crawler and the other 400 sources are used for their Instant Answers and widgets while all "traditional links" (i.e. the search results) come from Bing.

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