Just took a look at Blekko. It looks good, but you can't honestly believe the layman cares as much about it as he does about search engines coming out of MS or Google. Does the layman (MS' target audience here) even know about Blekko?
So do I think the 'layman' cares? Yes and no. I think they care that they get good search results, I don't think they care where they come from. As pg points out building a replacement search engine is a Hard Problem(tm). You can make a competitive search engine with just 15 - 20 million dollars, but displacing the existing player is more nuanced.
This is something Bing knows all too well, they effectively created a clone of Google's search capability and they only pull in about 30% of the market. Blekko has been steadily adding share primarily by not being the same as Google, rather we've added specific features that were valued by different segments of the market (we're still the only search engine that lets you completely turn off ads as a user preference for example) but mostly folks just use what ever the search box provides.
[1] Note that both Yahoo and Bing are effectively the same search engine as Yahoo is 'powered by' Bing results. http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2012/6/c...
You can do that with DuckDuckGo: http://duckduckgo.com/settings.html > Layout tab > Advertisements.
[I work at DDG.]
These were all front page. Over all I think Blekko has done a great job of being relevant and covered on HN.
Actually, here's a simple example. 44 pages when you search for Blekko using HNSearch - http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=blekko
DDG is a great product, we are one of their partners and we are providing some of their search results. They are also quite popular on HN I think in part because of the cool things they have been doing about creating interesting one-box kinds of things. But that said, they aren't a search "engine" they are a search "provider." That isn't a bad thing, in fact its a good thing because you can get Google results through DDG without having to get Google's "value added" stuff like G+ friends feeds or being "bubbled" as Gabe is great at pointing out. But the difference is that if the search engines stopped providing results, DDG would stop being able to return them until they built their own index. As would a number of other places like search.com or dogpile.com etc. The weird thing about search is that until Blekko came along and built a third, there were really only two web scale indexes being used, Bing's and Google's. Amazing is it not?
So I think DDG is pretty cool, love the ideas that Gabe comes up with, and am happy to partner with him to provide access to our index.
To rebut your statement that I was being disingenuous however, I suppose it depends on how measure or define 'well known.' From the perspective of various traffic reporting companies blekko.com is a bit more well known than duckduckgo.com which is not a perfect measure either but it does provide a different perspective.
Actually we crawl the Web a lot and have a bunch of our own indexes. A more apt description would be a hybrid search engine. More details at http://help.duckduckgo.com/customer/portal/articles/216399
Just to be clear, are you saying you no longer backfill results with Bing?
Also, we don't use any Google results right now.
"we do not expect to be wholly independent from third-parties."
That is the technical difference, search engines do expect to be, if not wholly, then at least materially independent from third-parties, they are the third parties, search providers are all about the experience.
But lets be really clear, that terminology distinction really only matters when you get behind the search bar as far as the world is concerned we're all search engines, even if, like search.com, they don't index anything, and while DDG provides tailored indexes which support key aspects of your site's experience. The differentiation is the experience in that case not where you get your data. And I fully recognize that this distinction is not important for a large chunk of the Internet [1].
For a general audience, yes, we're all search engines.
For a technical audience, no, we're not. And the distinction is whether or not you have a generalized web index or not.
For organic search they present to the end user in a nearly identical way, caveat the 'experience' benefits of one over the other.
But for other things, like "tell me all the sites on the internet that copied this article verbatim." or "give me a rundown on link authority to all inlinks to this page" those kinds of things you need both a web index, and rights to use it like that. That's a pretty objective difference in capability.
So in technical company (and I consider HN to be technical) I try to be crisp about the terminology, in non-technical company I refer to all of these offerings as search engines because it is less confusing and frankly they don't care what its called, they type in words and get results.
[1] My father in law (part of the 99%) thinks he logs into "Google" to get to the internet because Chrome defaults to Google's home page when it starts up.