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martinskou

Search is essential infrastructure for the internet and should not be monopolized.

It should be free, uncluttered, distributed and transparent.

The problem is not Google, its the lack of good alternatives, only DDG really.

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> Search is essential infrastructure for the internet

Agree 100%

> and should not be monopolized

There's an argument to be made that search is a case of natural monopoly. Today, google's success doesn't stem from PageRank. It's stems from Learning to Rank algorithms. Every time you click a hit, Google learns something. If you started distributing search traffic amongst a competitive market, no one provider would get the same training data Google gets today. The more competitive the market, the thinner each competitor's training data is - and consequently, the worse their product will be. To illustrate, think about how much better google is than DDG/Bing, and then how much better DDG/Bing is than whatever is third. (Apparently the third best is sufficiently bad that neither you nor I know what it is.)

Since Google is A) pretty far ahead of everyone else in this space and B) extremely secretive about search, it's really difficult to discern how much of their success comes from "more data" and how much comes from "better algos."

> The problem is not Google, its the lack of good alternatives, only DDG really.

My understanding is that a lot of DDG's value comes from using Bing. It's not a pure re-skin, but it aggregates results from multiple search engines and Bing is the biggest. (I'm not a DDG expert so please correct me if I'm getting it wrong here.)

The problem is that Bing is good for the same reasons as Google: they are the second biggest in a winner-takes-most market. They get lots of data (though not enough to be as good as Google), and presumably do all the same things for which people dislike Google.

So in short, maybe regulation is a more realistic goal than competition? I don't actually know where I stand here. I'm sure their are people here who disagree fiercely with everything I'm suggesting. I'd be grateful to hear their counterarguments.

Alternatives don't matter when distribution channels are controlled and locked in. Google controls 70% browser market share on PC(https://tinyurl.com/yxwjwnv7) and 64% mobile browser market share(https://tinyurl.com/y4uufb9d). But I think Google's problem is not dominant market position but slow pace of service quality improvement. Searching on Google 10 years ago and today feels way too similar and not much improved in terms of quality and UX.

It changed a lot I spend much less times searching and rather most of the time reading what I was looking for. It was opposite 10 years ago.

"reading what I was looking for" Elaborate. Reading the content you found or reading your browsing history?

And I meant search quality is rather the same.

   > Search is essential infrastructure for the internet and should not be monopolized.

Exactly! What a mess to have Google Marketing farting around with the world's information spigot. It's a good thing opportunities aren't physical objects, because it would be mightily depressing if we could see Google toss potential cures for cancer, and strategies for world peace down a well.

Im guessing the alternatives get better the more you use them.

Otherwise there are a lot of alternatives like : Bing Duck Duck Go ( as you mentioned ) Startpage Yandex

an image search for 'lemon party' is a good test.

Duck is a front-end for Bing. Why not use Bing?

That's both tired and inaccurate.

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).

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

See they admit your search results are most commonly from Bing. It’s really obvious when Bing, Duck, Ecosia all return the same results.

Largely from != "a front-end for Bing" (with merely being strongly implied).

In addition to additional privacy and Instant answers content, DDG seems to source other Web search for SERP, including operating its own bot, DuckDuckBot.

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

The problem with your response above is that it is inaccurate, fails to acknowledge real value-add features[1] of DDG, as well as being dismissive and stale as originally noted.

________________________________

Notes:

1. I've addressed these numerous times, though quality, relevance, presentation, JS-free version, bash-function invocability, and additiinal features with time, as well as simply Not Being Google, are all major factors. Sampling: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22506360 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17430474 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22506360 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21623573 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20405146

No, this answer is tired and inaccurate. They successfully fool you into thinking they are much more complex than they really are. They use Bing and Bing alone for the SERP links (without this, you don’t have a search engine) and their crawlers fill in the handful of “onebox” results for certain queries. They keep changing this statement but it used to say “multiple sources like Bing, Yahoo, Oath”... all of which are just Bing. It’s Bing with a couple of add-ons. If Bing were to go away tomorrow, your beloved DDG would be done.

Do you have a source for this?

The source is right above. Have you clicked on the link? They don't exactly hide the truth. If you click the link to their "400 sources", you'll be taken to a page that lists all of their "Instant Answers" sources only which supports their goal of providing information without leaving DDG. Interestingly, Google gets a lot of shit for scraping results from websites and not giving them the direct traffic, even in this very thread, but I guess we have lower expectations for a search engine that's 99% Bing.

I don't think DDG is quite as simple as a wrapper on Bing, just open both in private windows. Same search => different results.

The reason to use DDG isn't that its results are superior to Google/Bing (although imo this is true in many cases), the reason to use DDG is that its so clean. Google and Bing just feel spammy/garish in comparison

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

Only used for Instant Answers and widgets, as confirmed by your quote. All the actual search results are basically all Bing, again confirmed by the same quote from DDG themselves.

> 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 most of the actual search results come from Bing. The other 400 sources and DuckDuckBot are only used for widgets and stuff.

I don't understand why people keep linking to a page that clearly says it's mostly Bing as an argument for the opposite.

For the same reason you would use startpage instead of google. Or because you like the !bangs. Or because you prefer the layout. Or because you like the instant answers. Or because you think it might be worthwhile to support a small, not (particularly) evil search engine.

Suppose for just a moment that you were right and it were identical to Bing, just with slightly better privacy. Why not use Duck instead of Bing?

This might be helpful: https://www.quora.com/Why-should-I-use-DuckDuckGo-instead-of...

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