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Comment by mrvenkman | Hacker News Reader

Competing with Google is going to be difficult. I have a question: What is the consensus on forwarding any search "terms" to Google and then "scraping" the results back into the user - sort of a "proxy" search.

I mean - Google built their business on searching the internet, why can't there be a business that starts by searching Google?

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Forget Google, how are they gonna compete with DDG who has the "privacy conscious" market niche pretty well covered. That seems to be their main competitor here.

Having a semi-popular browser where they can set the default search engine would normally help, but if it's not free, I don't see why anyone would pay when, again, DDG does the same thing for free.

Let alone the rumors of Apple wanting to make its own search engine...

Their own browser's users would probably just end up paying in their BAT tokens or be able to use it for free, as long as they have ad rewards program enabled in the browser.

Even if it turns out to be better, my question is how are they practically going to onboard users like me (and the people I know.) Like I might try it out of curiosity because I saw it here on HN but I really doubt a lot of people care. DDG works fine for them.

Good point. It’s the DOS (Windows) vs Unix/Linux argument in a way.

You mean like Startpage?

> What is the consensus on forwarding any search "terms" to Google and then "scraping" the results back into the user - sort of a "proxy" search.

Isn't this what DuckDuckGo does but with Bing?

My understanding is that “DDG” have their own “web crawler”?

What I understand from your reply is that they don’t?

So if I search on Bing for a specific keyword, I will get the same results from DDG.

What about misspelled words? I have used DDG before.. for about two weeks. They offer poor suggestions for my misspelling.

What I’m suggesting is using Google results even after misspellings. What are the laws on scraping Google for suggestions/misspellings?

https://www.wired.com/2011/02/bing-copies-google/

How do you continue once you are big enough to be a threat to Google?

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