Hacker News Reader

Comment by ZinniaZirconium | Hacker News Reader

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...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com