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Comment by gnufx | Hacker News Reader

Is that meant to imply that the privacy protection and un-bubbling of the "middle men" is bogus? (I don't know about Qwant, but DDG isn't solely Bing, and it feeds some worthwhile organizations with donations.)

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I think DDG is more of a legitimate competitor in the search space than other engines running off the Bing index. My understanding is that they've been pretty transparent about using Bing and Yandex as sources for its product, have done quite a bit of work to tailor the results they spit back, and maintain their own knowledge graph for features like instant answers. They seem to function more as a metasearch engine.

From ehat I've seen, search engines like Ecosia and Qwant aren't very clear about what they bring to the table, beyond serving as a proxy for Bing that doesn't store as much data on you.

I don't think there's anything explicitly wrong with that. But I don't think they really merit anybody's attention either. Especially since they don't explicitly advertise what they are.

Ecosia explicitly specifies "Results from Microsoft" on every results page, so they seem pretty transparent there. I don't think DuckDuckGo and Qwant are as upfront about that.

They are about Yandex results. I always get a note when searching cyrillic content.

I think you can add +g to make DDG display Google results instead. But yes, it is not documented that well.

Are you referring to adding !g ? This redirects to Google but AFAIK there is no way to get Google results on a DDG-branded page.

Why are so many search engines trying to piggy back off other search engines? Can they not crawl sites themselves and cut out the extra layer? In a sea of bad websites I feel like if you started with a whitelist approach it could be a good basis.

Crawling is difficult these days as recaptcha and other measures keep bots out if you are not google or MS

That is quite unfortunate. How the hell are new original search engines supposed to compete?

I’ve worked in this space for over two years. They can’t. It’s simply not possible. The only feature that’s feasible to offer is privacy. You’ll never be able to catch up to Google or Bing with crawling.

In your opinion, do you think a new original search engine can survive in this landscape? Of course it would always be behind Google and Bing by about 15 years.

I've been reseasrching some ideas.

It's a pretty herculean task, moreso no than ever before. On top of the sheer volume of the internet, and the technical challenges of performant search, many sites are hostile to unknown scrapers, and automation.

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