Linux Mint signs a partnership with DuckDuckGo
blog.linuxmint.com
blog.linuxmint.com
Let people compete over what to do with the raw data (data which is of course publicly accessible but subject to the strange inequities of crawling), how best to process and present it, not over access to it. DDG has to pay Yahoo! for a BOSS license. That is just strange when you think about how the raw data was obtained. It is publicly available information.
Nothing against Yahoo! for doing that (selling access to publicly available data), as there are many other examples of this practice across web- "everyone else is doing it". But I do not think it is "the right thing" to do.
http://www.ysearchblog.com/2011/06/27/ydn-qa-with-duckduckgo...
Of course, that puts DDG in a dangerous situation, since it depends on Microsoft. Perhaps it has a long-term binding commitment from Microsoft, though, that wouldn't surprise me either.
Anyone know how DuckDuckGo do monetization?
[1]: http://my.opera.com/ruario/blog/2011/10/19/the-hidden-featur...
A search engine where you pay for Ad placement is very different to a search engine where you (effectively) pay for rankings.
Also frustrating is the fact that I couldn't spot the link from the official Linux Mint blog to the "please tell me what Linux Mint is" page. I ultimately resorted to Google. A conversion funnel tragedy.
> Also frustrating is the fact that I couldn't spot the link from the official Linux Mint blog to the [. . .]
Yes, this is a common and frustrating mistake. There's a bunch of stuff that I haven't bothered investigating because I get sent to a blog but can't be bothered to web-search for the product when there's no link.
Yes, it's incomprehensible why so many companies: a) don't use their normal headers for the blog, or at least b) put a prominent link back to the homepage (like the logo, for instance).
However, when the blog is at http://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=1884 it is not a gigantic leap of thought to go check what might be at http://www.linuxmint.com/, from where it's one click to the about page.
I think the poster was commenting on the difficulty of getting to the main web site, not the possibility. Having visitors hand-edit URIs is not considered slick customer conversion.
http://help.duckduckgo.com/customer/portal/articles/216399-s...
By now, in terms of functionality[1], I mostly use DDG for the bangs, having set it as my default search engine in Firefox (keyword.URL in about:settings) so I can search using the URL bar. I caught myself doing ^T and typing "!w keywords" (to search wikipedia) on other people's computers more than once by now.
[1] I originally switched because I'm very privacy conscious, and that's still my most powerful argument for using DDG, but it's by far not the only strong argument for duckgo'ing instead of googling.
You realize that you don't have to use DDG for this, right? You can set up keyword searches in the search bar in Firefox or Chrome (don't know about other browsers) for any site, not just those that DDG supports. Then just type 'w <search>' into the location bar and hit enter for Wikipedia, for example. You can even do cool things like set up custom searches, like my 'wl' search, which automatically prepends 'list of' to any Wikpedia search.
Besides, it eliminates two keystrokes. Considering the amount of times I look up something on Wikipedia every day, I'd say that it pays itself back in spades.