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I'm aware that DDG relies heavily on Bing. But that only highlights the dynamic at play: the issue hasn't been technical elements of delivering search results, but providing a compelling case to switch.

There's the additional situation that I'm absolutely no fan of Microsoft and trust them to my search data even less than I do Google. Handing either my queries via anonymizing proxies is rather more palatable, however.

DDG's share of search is still small, but its growth rate is on fire. It also seems to be largely organic (today's announcement by Apple would be an exception to this), which strikes me as generally more persuasive than growth driven by various sorts of gimmickery (see the extensive manipulations of web server stats Microsoft attempted through the years largely through changing parked domain hosting status).

Do you have a reference for search engine ranking? I'm not turning up any clear stats, though from Fool.com I get a reference to 4.7 million queries/day vs. 3 billion for Google. That puts DDG at 1/640th Google's traffic, though as I said: growing quickly.

http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2014/04/07/how-duckduc...

"the issue hasn't been technical elements of delivering search results, but providing a compelling case to switch."

The problem is that DDG's compelling case to switch (anonymous searching), undermines the technical reason that Bing can provide results that are competitive with Google. DDG would almost certainly suck if it wasn't built using a search engine that uses the collected behavior of millions of people to produce relevant results.

The "we don't track" thing is a great bit of propaganda for the insurgency, but it's a terrible burden if you happen to win the war.

DDG isn't just Bing, though I'm not sure how much of its results are based on that: https://duck.co/help/results/sources

"DuckDuckGo gets its results from over one hundred sources, including DuckDuckBot (our own crawler), crowd-sourced sites (like Wikipedia, which are stored in our own index), Yahoo! (through BOSS), Yandex, WolframAlpha, Yelp, and Bing."

I also don't see "we don't track" as a liability, given that Google themselves get relatively little by way of relevance from profiling (though it may contribute to ad sales). Rather (and this is straight from a Google engineer): "It's really hard to do much better in search advertising than current query + location."

https://plus.google.com/104092656004159577193/posts/HFT1emeF...

So: DDG gain a niche, possibly a large one, influence the marketplace, and lose very little in ad placement relevance.

DDG is "mostly" bing plus some conversion tools & navigation goodies etc.. It is just a glorified good old Metasearch engine with some extras.

Isn't Microsoft just supporting them to counter Google? I read somewhere (I have tried to find it again but I have failed so far) that Bing's cost of operation per search query was more than ten times that of Google.

I understand that DDG does not have to fulfill every Google use case. However, I don't see it likely that they're going to be number one any time soon. There are multiple discussions on HN where people say that if you can't be number one, you must shut down and walk away (I think we said something similar about Spring pad). Here we are encouraging DDG even though we know it will likely not be number one.

I am confused.

Isn't Microsoft just supporting them to counter Google?

As is Apple now.

Pretty much, though if DDG can make a go of it on their own, so much the better.

Sometimes balancing things against one another is useful. Actually, more than sometimes.

And if all it does is convince Google to stop ingesting so fucking much personal data I'll consider it mission fucking accomplished.

Though what I'd really like to see is a true distributed search engine capability emerge. There's a tool for this (YaCy) though it's still fairly rudimentary (and is Java based, which I'm increasingly allergic to).

> if you can't be number one, you must shut down and walk away

What a terrible and insane advice! Apple doesn't sell as many phones as Samsung and therefor they should shut down and walk? Or am I missing something here?

Don't quote me on this but this seemed to be the consensus in the spring pad shutdown thread right here on HN. How is this any different? Well, Apple doesn't sell nearly as many phones as Samsung but they are probably an anomaly as they have high margins and are sitting on a huge pile of cash. They can afford to tough it out. I see your point now actually. I doubt if Apple ever needs to be in "first place". They are doing perfectly well where they are and I guess holding a fourth to fifth of all app phones is a pretty good spot when the bill of materials is less than $200 and the sale price is $600.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7829901

Anybody who thinks that an enterprise should be stopped if you are not number one is a misguided twit.

1. It would lead to toxic consumer environments with no competition.

2. It would stifle innovation as market incumbents could coast without further optimisation.

3. It fails to address the fact that everyone was in second place at some point. No industry or product is a spontaneous invention which has no competitors. The automobile had the horse; even Gutenberg had competition.

Stop if you are not number one. Craziest business mantra ever.

To me, this screams that there's an interface problem for other search engines. Google gained the majority of market share when they were providing clean and simple search results while competitors littered pages with tons of ads, banners, "curated" (often shoddy, paid) content, and oh-so-many portals.

Bing's search results are OK, but when you compare the search result pages, DuckDuckGo is much cleaner and easier to navigate even with the same results. Google is almost as bad as Bing now, where the number of ads outnumber actual search results.

Bing, to me, tries too hard to be a destination, rather than a highly tuned tool to help me find websites.

If I recall history correctly, Google was the first to monetize SERPs with ads. It is their golden goose.

> If I recall history correctly, Google was the first to monetize SERPs with ads.

You don't. All major SE that predated Google did so, from AltaVista to Yahoo... I used to maintain a CGI-based wrapper for a bunch of SE (these 2 plus "USE IT!", Lycos, Infoseek, WWWW, anyone remember them?) in the mid-/late 90's that removed the annoying ads from search results.

Google was the first SE with text based ads though, from what I remember.

More to the point: where the early search engines were placing paid results directly into SERPs, Google has pretty much always distinguished its search results from advertising. Not always with crystal clarity, but reasonably well.

This from a critic.

Early SE used graphical ads that were clearly distinguishable from search results (although yes, some search results were probably unmarked paid placements, which would be illegal in some countries nowdays).

The current situation is worse for users both on Google and competing SEs, paid text ads are put in front of and made to look like search results. On mobile browsers, you typically have to scroll past several ads to see a single real search result.

I seem to recall that results placement was being directly influenced by advertising / promotional consideration. Granted, this is ~15 year old memories, but I was generally using Alta Vista or Yahoo at the time. I could be wrong.

Google's benefits were relevance of results (you'd find what you were looking for on the first page, very nearly always as the first result), as well as speed. Not polluting results with adverts would help with relevance (advertising is often distressingly irrelevant).

Bing was actually more accurate than DDG.

It provided a local apple store which I know of as the 5th result when DDG just showed the generic untargeted bing results.

Interesting - so you perceive non-anonymised results as better.

DDG's main drawcard is anonymity, and Google/Bing are hoping the masses will prefer customised results. So if your perception is common, DDG is in trouble.

Or perhaps they can find a way to provide location data in their anonymised searches.

Many of my friends, technical and non-technical, do prefer tracking precisely for this reason. They find it more convenient that the search engine knows their preferences, location, etc.

That's because DDG isn't geocoding you. "apple store" + ZIP or city name should work.

Yes, that "untargeting" would be the whole point of using "a search engine that doesn’t track you".