4 ms·

DDG exists because Google lets it exist. It's not really a full blown search engine.

by melted 11y ago

silverbax88 11y ago
It's funny, I recall people saying that about Microsoft 'letting Google exist' at one point...
- melted 11y ago
  At one point Microsoft had an option to buy Google for peanuts. Ballmer declined because he didn't see how it'd ever make money.
mrweasel 11y ago
How so? I don't see how Google could stop DuckDuckGo. It's not really relevant either, the two companies aren't really the same types of businesses. DDG is a very niche, and I doubt it would scale to the size of Google. Likewise Google have to make some compromises, that DDG will not, to finance it self.
- melted 11y ago
  Google is one of DDGs backends, and the highest quality one at that. DDG does not have its own crawlers or index. Nor could it: those things cost hundreds of millions of dollars per year to run and maintain. [Edit: apparently this is not true. DDG does not use Google, though it does use Bing and some other broad and narrow coverage search engines]
  - AdamSC1 11y ago
    DuckDuckGo in no way uses Google. We do use other sources, but Google isn't one of them.
    - melted 11y ago
      Looks like my information is either out of date or was incorrect all along. Bing seems to be the primary source. They seem to also have a crawler now, though it's not clear how much it really covers. Very cool. Slow and steady wins the race.
    - graeme 11y ago
      I posted this elsewhere, but I didn't get an answer. Since you work you work for DDG, you might know. How long would duckduckgo have to grow at its current rate to become an actual blip on Google's radar? On the one hand, you're small. On the other hand, keep up a fast growth rate long enough and you get bigger faster than people's intuitions' expect. https://duckduckgo.com/traffic.html https://duckduckgo.com/traffic.html
  - mahranch 11y ago
    > Nor could it: those things cost hundreds of millions of dollars per year to run and maintain. I vehemently disagree. The early web crawlers and indexes did not cost hundreds of millions of dollars to run. Granted, there is significantly less web results than there are today, but the cost you're referring too is the entirety of google's servers. That price tag also includes the cost to host the web traffic of being the number 1 website in the world. You're talking a price tag which is indicative of a final product. A new search engine would not have those costs initially, and if managed properly from the very beginning, would be able to scale and cover their bills, remaining profitable up until reaching (and hypothetically) replacing google.
    - melted 11y ago
      Microsoft spends over $1B/yr on maintaining and improving Bing. So yeah, search does cost a fortune if you want to do it reasonably well without relying on others for results. Not only do you have to crawl the web (with different frequencies depending on predicted frequency of content update, etc), you then have to rebuild the index continuously, with reasonable latency. To do all of that, you have to have indexing infrastructure, which in turns requires storage infrastructure, high performanc data processing infrastructure (Hadoop ain't gonna do it, ask Yahoo as to why), which in turn requires high performance networking (or your mapreduce-like workloads will collapse under their own weight), your own datacenter, and your own army of machine learning researchers, systems engineers, hardware engineers, networking engineers, devops, quality engineers (people who improve your scoring function), human eval, etc, etc, etc. If anything, $1B/yr seems to be quite low.
      - mahranch 11y ago
        > Microsoft spends over $1B/yr on maintaining and improving Bing. So yeah, search does cost a fortune I doubt that figure, but even if it is true, you're still talking about a final product (not a new start up). It's a figure that includes things like marketing and insane web traffic. These are things that a new search engine would not have initially. I'm not saying running a search engine is cheap. It's not. But the implication is that it's like the pharmaceutical industry where you need billions just to get in the game. It's not like that at all. In fact, there have been a few search engines which have tried to get in the game. Search engines like Cuil (anyone remember them?). They may have failed but that doesn't mean it's impossible. And it certainly doesn't take hundreds of millions of dollars to get started.

DDG exists because Google lets it exist. It's not really a full blown search engine.

by melted 11y ago

DDG exists because Google lets it exist. It's not really a full blown search engine.

silverbax88 11y ago

It's funny, I recall people saying that about Microsoft 'letting Google exist' at one point...

melted 11y ago
At one point Microsoft had an option to buy Google for peanuts. Ballmer declined because he didn't see how it'd ever make money.

mrweasel 11y ago

How so? I don't see how Google could stop DuckDuckGo. It's not really relevant either, the two companies aren't really the same types of businesses. DDG is a very niche, and I doubt it would scale to the size of Google. Likewise Google have to make some compromises, that DDG will not, to finance it self.

melted 11y ago
Google is one of DDGs backends, and the highest quality one at that. DDG does not have its own crawlers or index. Nor could it: those things cost hundreds of millions of dollars per year to run and maintain. [Edit: apparently this is not true. DDG does not use Google, though it does use Bing and some other broad and narrow coverage search engines]
- AdamSC1 11y ago
  DuckDuckGo in no way uses Google. We do use other sources, but Google isn't one of them.
  - melted 11y ago
    Looks like my information is either out of date or was incorrect all along. Bing seems to be the primary source. They seem to also have a crawler now, though it's not clear how much it really covers. Very cool. Slow and steady wins the race.
  - graeme 11y ago
    I posted this elsewhere, but I didn't get an answer. Since you work you work for DDG, you might know. How long would duckduckgo have to grow at its current rate to become an actual blip on Google's radar? On the one hand, you're small. On the other hand, keep up a fast growth rate long enough and you get bigger faster than people's intuitions' expect. https://duckduckgo.com/traffic.html https://duckduckgo.com/traffic.html
- mahranch 11y ago
  > Nor could it: those things cost hundreds of millions of dollars per year to run and maintain. I vehemently disagree. The early web crawlers and indexes did not cost hundreds of millions of dollars to run. Granted, there is significantly less web results than there are today, but the cost you're referring too is the entirety of google's servers. That price tag also includes the cost to host the web traffic of being the number 1 website in the world. You're talking a price tag which is indicative of a final product. A new search engine would not have those costs initially, and if managed properly from the very beginning, would be able to scale and cover their bills, remaining profitable up until reaching (and hypothetically) replacing google.
  - melted 11y ago
    Microsoft spends over $1B/yr on maintaining and improving Bing. So yeah, search does cost a fortune if you want to do it reasonably well without relying on others for results. Not only do you have to crawl the web (with different frequencies depending on predicted frequency of content update, etc), you then have to rebuild the index continuously, with reasonable latency. To do all of that, you have to have indexing infrastructure, which in turns requires storage infrastructure, high performanc data processing infrastructure (Hadoop ain't gonna do it, ask Yahoo as to why), which in turn requires high performance networking (or your mapreduce-like workloads will collapse under their own weight), your own datacenter, and your own army of machine learning researchers, systems engineers, hardware engineers, networking engineers, devops, quality engineers (people who improve your scoring function), human eval, etc, etc, etc. If anything, $1B/yr seems to be quite low.
    - mahranch 11y ago
      > Microsoft spends over $1B/yr on maintaining and improving Bing. So yeah, search does cost a fortune I doubt that figure, but even if it is true, you're still talking about a final product (not a new start up). It's a figure that includes things like marketing and insane web traffic. These are things that a new search engine would not have initially. I'm not saying running a search engine is cheap. It's not. But the implication is that it's like the pharmaceutical industry where you need billions just to get in the game. It's not like that at all. In fact, there have been a few search engines which have tried to get in the game. Search engines like Cuil (anyone remember them?). They may have failed but that doesn't mean it's impossible. And it certainly doesn't take hundreds of millions of dollars to get started.