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Comment by vinaypai | Hacker News Reader

Google in 1999 was an upstart search provider promising a clean, minimal, user-focused ad-supported search experience as an alternative to entrenched search engines like Lycos, Altavista, Yahoo.

DuckDuckGo in 2022 is an upstart search provider promising a clean, minimal, user-focused ad-supported search experience as an alternative to entrenched search engines like Google.

I'm old enough to remember when Google was the new and exciting thing (just give it a try and ignore the stupid-sounding name!). For the longest time there wasn't even such a thing as a Google account, it just saved preferences like safe-search locally using cookies, and ads were just a small distinctly colored text bar above the organic search results, directly related to your search keywords.

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The original Google ads were actually to the side - no way of confusing them with organic listings. Ads above results weren’t rolled out until 2007ish. Internally there was a lot of debate as to whether this might be confusing to users/evil, so the decision was to only show ads above results on queries that appeared to be high commercial intent. RIP old Google

True.

Not sure how paying for this service makes it any less likely that DDG will flip a switch to make that targeted advertising money though. That temptation will exist either with a paid service or a non targeted ad supported service.

Nothing is guaranteed, but at least you are the customer not the product if it's a paid service.

I have very little tolerance for companies that double-dip though. I subscribed to the New York Times for a while, but cancelled, in part, because they still stuffed their pages with ads both explicit and implicit.

What are some of the reasons you expect a $4.25/week digital subscription to have fewer ads than a $20/week newsprint subscription?

You need to be explained why it's cheaper to publish news to a website than print physical papers every morning and deliver them to homes across the country every single day in time for it to be relevant?

Lmao show the numbers then. Is the cost of printing 75% of the newspaper- probably not.

What search engine do you use ( I am assuming its not google ) ?

I currently use Neeva. They're okay, but I'm still looking for a better option. I don't subscribe to their paid version because the upgrades you get just seem like silly gimics to me. They have some good ideas but fall short on execution in my mind.

I really want the option to turn off certain sites (eg. w3schools) entirely from search results, not just demote them.

Consider paying for kagi.com.

As a paying subscriber, I 2nd this - it's great.

Thanks, I'll check them out.

Personally I see a difference between a search company funded by ads vs a privacy company that leverages anonymous search ads to pay for its privacy offerings. I mean yeah DDG could completely flip its business model but what would they actually flip to? Their only main differentiator is that they are privacy friendly.

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