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DuckDuckGo claims to be all for privacy. What it doesn't tell users is that it is just a wrapper around Bing search results. The $10M they plan to spend is just

DuckDuckGo claims to be all for privacy. What it doesn't tell users is that it is just a wrapper around Bing search results. The $10M they plan to spend is just going to increase search traffic to Bing.

danielmorozoff 8y ago
Is this actually true?
- cpeterso 8y ago
  Wikipedia says DuckDuckGo generates "results from over 400 individual sources, including crowdsourced sites such as Wikipedia, and other search engines like Bing, Yahoo!, and Yandex." Even if it was just a proxy to the Bing Search API, DDG users would be unseen by Bing servers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuckDuckGo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuckDuckGo
- mdaniel 8y ago
  They cite Bing, Yahoo, and Yandex as "sourced from," and they do list DuckDuckBot as its own thing -- although I am pretty sure they don't have the same resources for running their own distributed crawls as the 3 sources they list: https://duck.co/help/results/sources https://duck.co/help/results/sources
  - Kiro 8y ago
    DuckDuckBot only handles results for Instant Answers afaik. No own spiders in the traditional sense (following links between domains).
- jlarocco 8y ago
  No, in general it's not. https://duck.co/forum/thread/4350/did-you-know-that-duckduckgo-bing https://duck.co/forum/thread/4350/did-you-know-that-duckduck... IME, inline results from third party sites (like StackOverflow, images, youtube videos, etc.) are pretty easy to notice when they're included and easy to tell where they came from.
- anilshanbhag 8y ago
  https://duck.co/help/results/sources https://duck.co/help/results/sources says they have 400 sources which is special cases like Wikipedia,etc. The core search is powered by Bing (Yahoo uses Bing) and Yandex in Russia.
- mda 8y ago
  My guess is that it is mostly bing, a few percentages for other sources. They never share the breakdown. It would spoil their magic I suppose.
jdck1326 8y ago
"all for privacy" implies that duckduckgo cares about privacy at an ethical level, which doesn't really seem to be the case. I think it's more likely that they simply saw private search as a hole in a profitable market and decided to try to fill it. Before founding duckduckgo, CEO Gabriel Weinberg ran Names Database. Names database was a social media site that collected personal information much more aggressively than any modern site that I'm aware of. This information was sold happily by Weinberg for about ten million dollars to classmates.com (a particularly controversial subsidiary of United Online) just two years before founding duckduckgo.

danielmorozoff 8y ago

Is this actually true?

cpeterso 8y ago
Wikipedia says DuckDuckGo generates "results from over 400 individual sources, including crowdsourced sites such as Wikipedia, and other search engines like Bing, Yahoo!, and Yandex." Even if it was just a proxy to the Bing Search API, DDG users would be unseen by Bing servers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuckDuckGo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuckDuckGo
mdaniel 8y ago
They cite Bing, Yahoo, and Yandex as "sourced from," and they do list DuckDuckBot as its own thing -- although I am pretty sure they don't have the same resources for running their own distributed crawls as the 3 sources they list: https://duck.co/help/results/sources https://duck.co/help/results/sources
- Kiro 8y ago
  DuckDuckBot only handles results for Instant Answers afaik. No own spiders in the traditional sense (following links between domains).
jlarocco 8y ago
No, in general it's not. https://duck.co/forum/thread/4350/did-you-know-that-duckduckgo-bing https://duck.co/forum/thread/4350/did-you-know-that-duckduck... IME, inline results from third party sites (like StackOverflow, images, youtube videos, etc.) are pretty easy to notice when they're included and easy to tell where they came from.
anilshanbhag 8y ago
https://duck.co/help/results/sources https://duck.co/help/results/sources says they have 400 sources which is special cases like Wikipedia,etc. The core search is powered by Bing (Yahoo uses Bing) and Yandex in Russia.
mda 8y ago
My guess is that it is mostly bing, a few percentages for other sources. They never share the breakdown. It would spoil their magic I suppose.

jdck1326 8y ago

"all for privacy" implies that duckduckgo cares about privacy at an ethical level, which doesn't really seem to be the case. I think it's more likely that they simply saw private search as a hole in a profitable market and decided to try to fill it. Before founding duckduckgo, CEO Gabriel Weinberg ran Names Database. Names database was a social media site that collected personal information much more aggressively than any modern site that I'm aware of. This information was sold happily by Weinberg for about ten million dollars to classmates.com (a particularly controversial subsidiary of United Online) just two years before founding duckduckgo.