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Comment by stroboskop | Hacker News Reader

DuckDuckGo is definitely pulling users from Google. By mimicking Facebook, Google has lost its mojo. Stepped right into the "social" honeypot. No news. The more interesting thing is the fantastic feeling more and more people have: that Facebook and Google will take eachother down the spiral.

As for the Google part, right now it's probably just an alarmist prediction, but it's going to be fun to watch un/fold. Especially if DuckDuckGo and other engines continue to get better while practicing their principles instead of a crude mixture of addictive search quality, addictedness to bucks and PR along the lines of "Don't be evil".

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[1998]

Google is definitely pulling users from Yahoo. By mimicking Alta Vista, Yahoo has lost its mojo. Stepped right into the "portal" honeypot. No news. The more interesting thing is the fantastic feeling more and more people have: that Alta Vista and Yahoo will take eachother down the spiral.

As for the Yahoo part, right now it's probably just an alarmist prediction, but it's going to be fun to watch un/fold. Especially if Google and other engines continue to get better while practicing their principles instead of a crude mixture of addictive search quality, addictedness to bucks and PR along the lines of "Yahhooooo!".

Haha. Reminds of the "The social graph is neither" article [1].

"Right now the social networking sites occupy a similar position to CompuServe, Prodigy, or AOL in the mid 90's. At that time each company was trying to figure out how to become a mass-market gateway to the Internet."

[1] http://blog.pinboard.in/2011/11/the_social_graph_is_neither/

One difference in this story is....

Google was vertically integrated from the start: They sent out their own bots to scan the internet, they had their own reverse index, and created their own algorithm.

I'm not sure about DDGs backend---but if people use the g! tag, its almost as if DDG is simple chrome for Google.

Maybe that'll be the future: Google will become the maker of engines, and let everyone else make the car.

As far as I know, DDG uses both data from other search engines (Google, Bing) as well as its own crawling bots. If they only used their own crawlers, with the current size of the internet it would take a long time for them to get a good amount of data.

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