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What is the revenue generation model for DuckDuckGo?

298 points by lettergram 8y ago

__initbrian__ 8y ago
I started using DDG and Firefox after Chrome v69. I couldn't always find what I needed with DDG so I use g! when the search doesn't cut it (~20% of the time) but for the other 80% it's great. I've loved some unique features like the stack overflow first answer integration.I also noticed a big increase in Google advertising recently. Ads in the Gmail app and new types of ads--shopping ads below the YouTube video above the description and movie poster type ads on the right panel of some movie trailers. I bet their ad revenue in the next quarter is going to increase significantly. Is there a new person in charge or new decisions in place to serve more ads? (sorry about the Google search heavy comment but DDG revenue generation got me thinking about Google revenue)
stephengillie 8y ago
> In fact, search advertisers buy search ads by bidding on keywords, not people. It makes intuitive sense, too. If you search for ‘car’, you are more likely to respond to a car ad than something you searched for last week. This keyword-based advertising is our primary business model. The rest of the post is a rant about user tracking.
- utopcell 8y ago
  Indeed.
- andy_ppp 8y ago
  Rant seems extremely strong - how about we go with well thought through set of opinions that the CEO of Duck Duck Go is rigorously applying to his product. I personally found his argument so persuasive I intend to set everything to DuckDuckGo again now.
  - cbluth 8y ago
    Yeah, I'm convinced now, too
  - thelittleone 8y ago
    I made the switch to DDG about 12 months ago for all devices. It has been an entirely positive experience.
    - isaiahg 8y ago
      Been full DDG almost as long and now I can't go back. It gives me much better results than google does.
    - Nebbers 8y ago
      Went to try it for a week to see if it was viable. Haven't looked back and have never needed to go to Google's search engine for a year now. Best feature is by far the Stack Overflow 'instant answers'!
      - the_duke 8y ago
        I have it as my primary search engine now too, but I find myself constantly using !g because the results suck.
        hiccuphippo 8y ago
        Try !s instead of !g for startpage. Same results, less tracking.
        rovr138 8y ago
        Similar results. Sometimes the Google bubble helps. But I agree. I check on DuckDuckGo, if I can't find what I'm looking for, most of the time, adding !s finds it. If not, I go back and switching to !g.
        enriquto 8y ago
- dpcan 8y ago
  I think there's a problem with this model however. When the highest bidder wins, consumers and advertisers can lose, big. I understand how DDG has to say this is the best and smartest way to do things because they have to live with their promise of not creeping on their visitors - so they can't use the same analytics that someone like Google has. It's just marketing. But the ads that go to the top should be the most valuable, not necessarily go to the buyer with the deepest pockets. I suppose you could say "car" ads cost $x per click, and then let all advertisers rotate, but that's not helpful either. You could measure which one gets clicked the most and have it move to the top, but that can be gamed. If you had any way of knowing how long someone spends on the advertised websites, or base it off of social media reviews or allow consumers with verified accounts to rate ads, that might work better. I don't know, I just can't trust an ad format where I know the top click just spends the most money.
  - jimmy1 8y ago
    > I don't know, I just can't trust an ad format where I know the top click just spends the most money. Why? That's exactly how it works every where else: Radio, TV, Billboards. If two people want the same spot, the person who ponies up more money gets the spot.
    - Ibethewalrus 8y ago
      And that’s how Bing served malware
      - jimmy1 8y ago
        And that's how your local newspaper serves you telephone numbers to ambulance chasers and medicare fraudsters.
  - clubm8 8y ago
    >But the ads that go to the top should be the most valuable, not necessarily go to the buyer with the deepest pockets. It is my understanding that similar to Google, the first couple of links might be ads, but the rest are organic. I just did a search for a movie I like - To the right is an infobox with a blurb from Wikipedia + links to rotten tomatoes and IMDB. Under it is an amazon ad to buy a copy. The top 5 links are IMDB, Rotten Tomatoes, a definition of the word, and a trailer. Seems pretty unobtrusive and on point to me. If I wanted to buy a blu-ray of the movie I'd probably click that ad.
- AznHisoka 8y ago
  Has he never heard of retargeting? That model is essentially bidding on people. And I wouldnt be surprised if retargeting will become the most popular form or advertising targeting.
  - bkanber 8y ago
    He makes the distinction later on in the article. "Google is not a search company, they're an advertising company." Google has their display network all across the internet, DDG does not. Retargeting is a popular model for advertising companies, where the retargeting follows you around the internet. Retargeting is much less valuable if you are just a search company.
- aylmao 8y ago
  > The rest of the post is a rant about user tracking. Almost. There's also: > "The only other way we’ve found so far, which currently accounts for a much smaller portion of our revenue, is non-tracking affiliate partnerships with Amazon and eBay. > "When you visit those sites through DuckDuckGo, including when using !bangs, and subsequently make a purchase, we receive a small commission. This mechanism operates anonymously and there is no personally identifiable information exchanged between us and Amazon or eBay.
  - Technetium_Hat 8y ago
    that is a clever strategy -- there's a reason so many blogspam websites use it.
BoorishBears 8y ago
I don’t like how he presented the “creepy” line out of context. It was about doing things that are magical enough to make users happy, and just magical enough to not be creepy. Almost looks like he’s accusing Eric of claiming Google wants to be as unscrupulous in the way they operate as possible without being caught
- SiempreViernes 8y ago
  That's a pretty fair accusation I would say, they both do borderline illegal tax planning and manipulate search results for their own benefit. They also have deployed a hugely broken ip management system on youtube, and of course (like everyone else) they use workers on short term contracts to moderate all the violent shit that gets posted with little regard for the psychological impact on their workers of reviewing if something is child porn all day.
  - BoorishBears 8y ago
    He was talking about medical implants and alludes to the statement being about their advanced technological projects (ie. moonshots) He wasn’t talking about general Google policy.
- clubm8 8y ago
  >Almost looks like he’s accusing Eric of claiming Google wants to be as unscrupulous in the way they operate as possible without being caught Eric has said in public it is official Google policy to walk right up to the "creepy" line, so the accusation is not unwarranted given that google operates worldwide, and not every country has the same views on privacy as Americans. https://www.businessinsider.com/eric-schmidt-googles-policy-is-to-get-right-up-to-the-creepy-line-and-not-cross-it-2010-10?op=1&IR=T https://www.businessinsider.com/eric-schmidt-googles-policy-...
  - BoorishBears 8y ago
    How is that article not saying exactly what OP said and what I dispute? The context of the quote was medical implants in brains and his words were “Our policy on a lot of these things is to get up to the creepy line and not cross it [and that would cross it]” What he was clearly referring to is advanced tech projects, not general policy. It sounds like a play on the old any sufficiently advanced technology resembling magic line, and is completely harmless... Until you start taking it out of context and ignoring some of the words he said.
utopcell 8y ago
> "So why do they track it all then? Because Google is not really a search company [..]" What nonsense..
- utopcell 8y ago
  ..and, as is common practice with all these FUD articles originating from ddg, not a word about Bing's tracking practices. Incidentally, Bing provides their search results.
  - scribu 8y ago
    Just because DDG makes use of the Bing API doesn’t mean that DDG users are being tracked by Bing.
    - utopcell 8y ago
      The two big US search engines use personalization to give you better results. One of them is your main partner. You accuse only the other of evil-doing. I thought the reasoning was pretty clear.
  - sveme 8y ago
    The robot that crawls the web doesn‘t have anything to do with whether you are being tracked.
    - utopcell 8y ago
      What does that have to do with the point being made ?
- catacombs 8y ago
  Not nonsense. Google isn't a search company. It's an advertising company.
  - dgacmu 8y ago
dna_polymerase 8y ago
Oh look another anonymous question on Quora about a company, answered by the CEO of said company. And it is answered in such a direct way without any marketing for his service at all. \s These Q&A things on Quora are getting ridiculous. Without all the fluff that thing would condense to one sentence: We make money by context search ads and affiliate commission on !bang searches. The thing that I thought made Google even better (back in the 200xs) was that Google did no advertising for their service. People just recommended their service because it was so useful and good. DDG can't live up to that standard and so they have to highlight their built-in privacy whenever possible. It's like everything they offer, they rub it in your face. It feels like they don't care about the search problem but only about being so much more privacy-focused than Google. I can switch to StartPage and have Google + Privacy, with DDG it is just privacy without any good search results.
- RobertDeNiro 8y ago
  Quora is garbage. It's full of self-proclaimed experts, who give the impression that their answers are more valuable than those found on other questions/answering sites.
  - dna_polymerase 8y ago
    It used to be really useful, in the beginning, when people actually contributed to the platform for the sake of curating knowledge. Now it feels like an advertising platform. Either for companies or "influencer". Posts get artificially prolonged, people add stock images to make people click on the posts.
    - mrhappyunhappy 8y ago
      It’s been a while since I’ve ran across a quora post that wasn’t some form of advertising or follower building. I mostly do “search + Reddit” these days unless I know the topic wont be well covered there if it’s technical in nature. For things like product reviews Reddit has been ok, but not without manipulation by companies too. I guess at the end of the day you always have to read between the lines.
chiefalchemist 8y ago
> "Here are a few actionable things companies can do to remain profitable without tracking the maximum amount of information possible on consumers:" Can we add to his list: > Offer a paid option such that consumers who want to pay for privacy / less ads / no ads can. > Along with a paid option, companies should develop partnerships with like minded peers. For example, DDG could pair with various VPN providers and the DDG paid tier could included "free" with your VPN fee. That is, one payment, not two, two related services.
- gaius 8y ago
  Offer a paid option such that consumers who want to pay for privacy / less ads / no ads can The problem is that the customers with disposable income to pay to see no ads are exactly the people that admen want to reach. So it's unlikely that any ad-supported company will offer this. It would be as good as admitting to their real customers that their inventory (i.e. us) was of "low quality".
  - jvzr 8y ago
    I am also the type of users who dismiss any and every ads I see (after ad blocking), such as the infuriating Instagram Ads. I always dismiss & report them. I figured at some point Facebook would see that I don't want to see them, and cease wasting advertisers money on me, but I suppose Facebook doesn't really care who it shows its ads to, as long as the advertisers already paid. I don't understand why advertisers keep paying, though.
  - chiefalchemist 8y ago
    If YouTube can offer a no ads model then it can't be impossible. Mind you, Google is likely doing other trickery. But certainly there's got to be alternatives to ad blockers, etc.
    - gaius 8y ago
      They’ll still be extensively tracking you
    - 8y ago
the_other_guy 8y ago
I know that I am going to be downvoted and this comment is going to be deleted within minutes by DDG online army, but I've really had enough with all DDG shilling in online tech-based communities like HN, reddit and 4chan. Call me paranoid but I almost 100% sure that all these shill threads everyday are not a coincidence. The amazing thing is DDG itself is a mediocre search engine so I don't really understand what all this fuss is about anyway.
- sctb 8y ago
  I don't want to call you paranoid... but the guidelines ask you to please not post like this and email us instead. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
utopcell 8y ago
DuckDuckGo was a thin layer of perl scripts written by a single programmer, a wrapper around Yahoo's Search-as-a-Service (YBoSS.) When Yahoo shut down search and started serving Bing results, a YBoSS derivative was grand-fathered into the deal and DDG continued existing. I would not stake the future of my company on such a deal. This is why I believe DDG is now using Yandex in addition to Bing for serving results. The underlying question behind all privacy issues is that of trust. In this particular case, the question is: Would you trust Google, a company that has delivered real value, has helped democratize access to knowledge at a global scale and has everything to lose if it was revealed that they are misusing sensitive information, or would you trust a tiny wrapper-company that claims to not store your personal information but actually uses a Russian search engine for searching ? If you still went for DDG, what about when they decide to also use Baidu ? Privacy is all about trust. I _trust_ Google. I do not trust a company that spends enormous time in smearing campaigns.
- AznHisoka 8y ago
  With so much money raised, they have no excuse to build their own crawlers. Its been done by many companies less known.
- StanislavPetrov 8y ago
  >I _trust_ Google. Not smart. It's not an either/or issue. Nobody with a shred of intelligence trusts any corporation.
- yladiz 8y ago
  Google has misused information in the past. For example, they used to mine emails from Google Apps accounts for data even though they explicitly said they wouldn't, until it was found out and they stopped. I also disagree that I should trust a company that has provided "value" because I have found value in using Facebook since it lets me connect with people and friends that I otherwise wouldn't be able to, but I distrust them because they make money from my data and have, for example, used the number that was supposed to be used for SMS 2FA for advertising.
- Rinzler89 8y ago
jancsika 8y ago
> Though first, if you’re not familiar with DuckDuckGo, we are an Internet privacy company that empowers you to seamlessly take control of your personal information online, without any tradeoffs. For the record: by policy, or by design?
- utopcell 8y ago
  By accident: Bing (their main backend) would obviously not leak personal information to a third party site such as DDG.
mojuba 8y ago
I like DDG, but claiming that their ads are based only on keywords is just not true. They are at least also based on location. I just tried "dishwasher" and it brings up ads in French from local stores. But this is natural, because without the location most ads would probably be meaningless. The question is then, how far can you go by using the information available only in the user's HTTP request? Can you use the user's OS and device information? Where is the line exactly that DDG doesn't want to cross? Edit: I just realized that the answer is probably: yes DDG can use all available information to improve targeting, but it won't store it.
- gmueckl 8y ago
  When you use it for ads, but don't store it, how do you prove to your advertisers that you are keeping their contracts and showing the ads to the right target group?
  - mojuba 8y ago
    Good question, but I think the pay-per-click model should solve it?
    - gmueckl 8y ago
      If you find enough advertisers that are willing to go for that model, I agree.
blackhaz 8y ago
I'll probably be downvoted to hell, but I have to say this. I'm Ukrainian, so I have bias against anything related to Russian government, especially services pretending to be improving my privacy. So, my question is, what is DuckDuckGo's relationship to Yandex, a company fully controlled by Russian government and having track record sharing personal information with Russian security services?
- JCSato 8y ago
  Are. . .you aware of some relationship between the two? I don't think I've ever heard of them being linked.
  - 43920 8y ago
    DuckDuckGo has a deal with Yandex to display search results from them on some searches. If you search for something in Russian, you'll see a "in partnership with Yandex" message in the corner of the search results page.
    - gmueckl 8y ago
      Can you narrow the set of search engines from which the results are pulled?
      - detaro 8y ago
        no, they don't expose the sources.
    - JCSato 8y ago
      Ah, thank you for explaining.
- nickpsecurity 8y ago
  DuckDuckGo seems to be a metasearch engine that pulls from other sources and integrates the results somehow. It mainly uses Bing/Yahoo search. Yandex is also one of its sources. It shouldn't have a lot of risk if it's anonymizing the data sent to Yandex. I think there's bigger risk in network-level hacks of Ukraine by Russia where they could look at traffic directly or via stolen logs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metasearch_engine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metasearch_engine https://duck.co/help/results/sources https://duck.co/help/results/sources
ing33k 8y ago
I am getting targeted promoted tweet on Twitter for the same quora question.
Lurkars 8y ago
I switched about two years ago and do not miss any Google stuff. I think one very important point is persistent search: if I type in a query in my browser, I get the exact same result as in p.e. in my moms browser. A things that is so annoying in Google, because even an incognito browser give personalised search result. So the experience in fast finding tech help in Google can inverse on an non techy device. Using ddg: always same experience. A feature you don't want to miss, if you often use other devices, like helping friends and family.
- __initbrian__ 8y ago
  I generally agree. I'd like the same search to return the same results. But I bet there are things I'd be willing for it to be different. I can only think of 'food near me' though
  - Lurkars 8y ago
    Of course, it wasn't meant too generally. I also don't want to get the same results over years p.e. To summarize: I strongly prefere non personalized results, persistence was the wrong term here. So "food near me" should give us the same results, when we're at the same place (& nearly same time).
losvedir 8y ago
> Alarmingly, Google now deploys hidden trackers on 76% of websites across the web to monitor your behavior Is this referring to Google Analytics? If so, I feel like "Google deploys" isn't quite fair compared to "Google's tracker is deployed" or something to that effect. But in any case, the phrasing is confusing enough to me to post here, since I want to know if it means something other than GA, which I understand and can block with uMatrix.
- piyush_soni 8y ago
  This is the CEO of DDG deliberately spreading FUD to innocent people on platforms like Quora in my book. And he's a regular visitor there hijacking many threads promoting his business. I reported his out of place promotional answers once or twice, saying if the CEO of a company is spamming, will it not count as a spam (as opposed to normal people)? Quora didn't remove the answer, for some reason. This one is of course a slightly relevant answer here, but again with his usual dose of competitor bashing and spreading FUD that is a little out of taste for me personally. Also, may be he's speaking it just for the sake of promotion and doesn't take it too seriously himself, but the quality of search results can definitely be greatly improved when you know more about a person than just their search keywords (or even their country). If he actually believes what he says on Quora, I won't place my bet on his business doing too great in the future. 1. The first example (what he writes in his answer) - when I type "dishwasher" in DDG, every shopping website it lists on the first page is from USA, and I don't even live in the same continent. Even when I enable my country results through the button shown on top of the page, the shopping websites are not even the top ones in my country. When I type that in Google, it lists not only the top e-sellers in the country, the most popular local stores in my area as well. What will the advertisers achieve when they don't even know which place I live in? Who will sell me that dishwasher? 2. When I type Zoo, it's pretty damn clear I want to search a zoo in my area. DDG's results even when country is enabled are plain stupid. Write in Google, and it tells me exactly what I want to know. 3. When I type 'Jaguar' in the search box, all top link results are of the Jaguar car, but all the top image results are the Jaguar animal. Google is much more consistent here. I can give tens of examples of why personalization of search results is not that bad an idea for the value it adds. Of course, there are very important negative side effects to it, and that's why we have DDG. But I would have respected his opinion much more had he acknowledged that personalization of search results adds a great value, but also has other consequences, like any balanced personal who can see both sides of a coin.
ydushyant 8y ago
i switched to DDG like 6 months ago, i really like it & i dont plan to go back to google

298 points by lettergram 8y ago

I started using DDG and Firefox after Chrome v69. I couldn't always find what I needed with DDG so I use g! when the search doesn't cut it (~20% of the time) but for the other 80% it's great. I've loved some unique features like the stack overflow first answer integration.I also noticed a big increase in Google advertising recently. Ads in the Gmail app and new types of ads--shopping ads below the YouTube video above the description and movie poster type ads on the right panel of some movie trailers. I bet their ad revenue in the next quarter is going to increase significantly. Is there a new person in charge or new decisions in place to serve more ads? (sorry about the Google search heavy comment but DDG revenue generation got me thinking about Google revenue)

stephengillie 8y ago

> In fact, search advertisers buy search ads by bidding on keywords, not people. It makes intuitive sense, too. If you search for ‘car’, you are more likely to respond to a car ad than something you searched for last week. This keyword-based advertising is our primary business model. The rest of the post is a rant about user tracking.

utopcell 8y ago
Indeed.
andy_ppp 8y ago
Rant seems extremely strong - how about we go with well thought through set of opinions that the CEO of Duck Duck Go is rigorously applying to his product. I personally found his argument so persuasive I intend to set everything to DuckDuckGo again now.
- cbluth 8y ago
  Yeah, I'm convinced now, too
- thelittleone 8y ago
  I made the switch to DDG about 12 months ago for all devices. It has been an entirely positive experience.
  - isaiahg 8y ago
    Been full DDG almost as long and now I can't go back. It gives me much better results than google does.
  - Nebbers 8y ago
    Went to try it for a week to see if it was viable. Haven't looked back and have never needed to go to Google's search engine for a year now. Best feature is by far the Stack Overflow 'instant answers'!
    - the_duke 8y ago
      I have it as my primary search engine now too, but I find myself constantly using !g because the results suck.
      - hiccuphippo 8y ago
        Try !s instead of !g for startpage. Same results, less tracking.
        rovr138 8y ago
        Similar results. Sometimes the Google bubble helps. But I agree. I check on DuckDuckGo, if I can't find what I'm looking for, most of the time, adding !s finds it. If not, I go back and switching to !g.
      - enriquto 8y ago
dpcan 8y ago
I think there's a problem with this model however. When the highest bidder wins, consumers and advertisers can lose, big. I understand how DDG has to say this is the best and smartest way to do things because they have to live with their promise of not creeping on their visitors - so they can't use the same analytics that someone like Google has. It's just marketing. But the ads that go to the top should be the most valuable, not necessarily go to the buyer with the deepest pockets. I suppose you could say "car" ads cost $x per click, and then let all advertisers rotate, but that's not helpful either. You could measure which one gets clicked the most and have it move to the top, but that can be gamed. If you had any way of knowing how long someone spends on the advertised websites, or base it off of social media reviews or allow consumers with verified accounts to rate ads, that might work better. I don't know, I just can't trust an ad format where I know the top click just spends the most money.
- jimmy1 8y ago
  > I don't know, I just can't trust an ad format where I know the top click just spends the most money. Why? That's exactly how it works every where else: Radio, TV, Billboards. If two people want the same spot, the person who ponies up more money gets the spot.
  - Ibethewalrus 8y ago
    And that’s how Bing served malware
    - jimmy1 8y ago
      And that's how your local newspaper serves you telephone numbers to ambulance chasers and medicare fraudsters.
- clubm8 8y ago
  >But the ads that go to the top should be the most valuable, not necessarily go to the buyer with the deepest pockets. It is my understanding that similar to Google, the first couple of links might be ads, but the rest are organic. I just did a search for a movie I like - To the right is an infobox with a blurb from Wikipedia + links to rotten tomatoes and IMDB. Under it is an amazon ad to buy a copy. The top 5 links are IMDB, Rotten Tomatoes, a definition of the word, and a trailer. Seems pretty unobtrusive and on point to me. If I wanted to buy a blu-ray of the movie I'd probably click that ad.
AznHisoka 8y ago
Has he never heard of retargeting? That model is essentially bidding on people. And I wouldnt be surprised if retargeting will become the most popular form or advertising targeting.
- bkanber 8y ago
  He makes the distinction later on in the article. "Google is not a search company, they're an advertising company." Google has their display network all across the internet, DDG does not. Retargeting is a popular model for advertising companies, where the retargeting follows you around the internet. Retargeting is much less valuable if you are just a search company.
aylmao 8y ago
> The rest of the post is a rant about user tracking. Almost. There's also: > "The only other way we’ve found so far, which currently accounts for a much smaller portion of our revenue, is non-tracking affiliate partnerships with Amazon and eBay. > "When you visit those sites through DuckDuckGo, including when using !bangs, and subsequently make a purchase, we receive a small commission. This mechanism operates anonymously and there is no personally identifiable information exchanged between us and Amazon or eBay.
- Technetium_Hat 8y ago
  that is a clever strategy -- there's a reason so many blogspam websites use it.

BoorishBears 8y ago

I don’t like how he presented the “creepy” line out of context. It was about doing things that are magical enough to make users happy, and just magical enough to not be creepy. Almost looks like he’s accusing Eric of claiming Google wants to be as unscrupulous in the way they operate as possible without being caught

SiempreViernes 8y ago
That's a pretty fair accusation I would say, they both do borderline illegal tax planning and manipulate search results for their own benefit. They also have deployed a hugely broken ip management system on youtube, and of course (like everyone else) they use workers on short term contracts to moderate all the violent shit that gets posted with little regard for the psychological impact on their workers of reviewing if something is child porn all day.
- BoorishBears 8y ago
  He was talking about medical implants and alludes to the statement being about their advanced technological projects (ie. moonshots) He wasn’t talking about general Google policy.
clubm8 8y ago
>Almost looks like he’s accusing Eric of claiming Google wants to be as unscrupulous in the way they operate as possible without being caught Eric has said in public it is official Google policy to walk right up to the "creepy" line, so the accusation is not unwarranted given that google operates worldwide, and not every country has the same views on privacy as Americans. https://www.businessinsider.com/eric-schmidt-googles-policy-is-to-get-right-up-to-the-creepy-line-and-not-cross-it-2010-10?op=1&IR=T https://www.businessinsider.com/eric-schmidt-googles-policy-...
- BoorishBears 8y ago
  How is that article not saying exactly what OP said and what I dispute? The context of the quote was medical implants in brains and his words were “Our policy on a lot of these things is to get up to the creepy line and not cross it [and that would cross it]” What he was clearly referring to is advanced tech projects, not general policy. It sounds like a play on the old any sufficiently advanced technology resembling magic line, and is completely harmless... Until you start taking it out of context and ignoring some of the words he said.

utopcell 8y ago

> "So why do they track it all then? Because Google is not really a search company [..]" What nonsense..

utopcell 8y ago
..and, as is common practice with all these FUD articles originating from ddg, not a word about Bing's tracking practices. Incidentally, Bing provides their search results.
- scribu 8y ago
  Just because DDG makes use of the Bing API doesn’t mean that DDG users are being tracked by Bing.
  - utopcell 8y ago
    The two big US search engines use personalization to give you better results. One of them is your main partner. You accuse only the other of evil-doing. I thought the reasoning was pretty clear.
- sveme 8y ago
  The robot that crawls the web doesn‘t have anything to do with whether you are being tracked.
  - utopcell 8y ago
    What does that have to do with the point being made ?
catacombs 8y ago
Not nonsense. Google isn't a search company. It's an advertising company.
- dgacmu 8y ago

dna_polymerase 8y ago

Oh look another anonymous question on Quora about a company, answered by the CEO of said company. And it is answered in such a direct way without any marketing for his service at all. \s These Q&A things on Quora are getting ridiculous. Without all the fluff that thing would condense to one sentence: We make money by context search ads and affiliate commission on !bang searches. The thing that I thought made Google even better (back in the 200xs) was that Google did no advertising for their service. People just recommended their service because it was so useful and good. DDG can't live up to that standard and so they have to highlight their built-in privacy whenever possible. It's like everything they offer, they rub it in your face. It feels like they don't care about the search problem but only about being so much more privacy-focused than Google. I can switch to StartPage and have Google + Privacy, with DDG it is just privacy without any good search results.

RobertDeNiro 8y ago
Quora is garbage. It's full of self-proclaimed experts, who give the impression that their answers are more valuable than those found on other questions/answering sites.
- dna_polymerase 8y ago
  It used to be really useful, in the beginning, when people actually contributed to the platform for the sake of curating knowledge. Now it feels like an advertising platform. Either for companies or "influencer". Posts get artificially prolonged, people add stock images to make people click on the posts.
  - mrhappyunhappy 8y ago
    It’s been a while since I’ve ran across a quora post that wasn’t some form of advertising or follower building. I mostly do “search + Reddit” these days unless I know the topic wont be well covered there if it’s technical in nature. For things like product reviews Reddit has been ok, but not without manipulation by companies too. I guess at the end of the day you always have to read between the lines.

chiefalchemist 8y ago

> "Here are a few actionable things companies can do to remain profitable without tracking the maximum amount of information possible on consumers:" Can we add to his list: > Offer a paid option such that consumers who want to pay for privacy / less ads / no ads can. > Along with a paid option, companies should develop partnerships with like minded peers. For example, DDG could pair with various VPN providers and the DDG paid tier could included "free" with your VPN fee. That is, one payment, not two, two related services.

gaius 8y ago
Offer a paid option such that consumers who want to pay for privacy / less ads / no ads can The problem is that the customers with disposable income to pay to see no ads are exactly the people that admen want to reach. So it's unlikely that any ad-supported company will offer this. It would be as good as admitting to their real customers that their inventory (i.e. us) was of "low quality".
- jvzr 8y ago
  I am also the type of users who dismiss any and every ads I see (after ad blocking), such as the infuriating Instagram Ads. I always dismiss & report them. I figured at some point Facebook would see that I don't want to see them, and cease wasting advertisers money on me, but I suppose Facebook doesn't really care who it shows its ads to, as long as the advertisers already paid. I don't understand why advertisers keep paying, though.
- chiefalchemist 8y ago
  If YouTube can offer a no ads model then it can't be impossible. Mind you, Google is likely doing other trickery. But certainly there's got to be alternatives to ad blockers, etc.
  - gaius 8y ago
    They’ll still be extensively tracking you
  - 8y ago

the_other_guy 8y ago

I know that I am going to be downvoted and this comment is going to be deleted within minutes by DDG online army, but I've really had enough with all DDG shilling in online tech-based communities like HN, reddit and 4chan. Call me paranoid but I almost 100% sure that all these shill threads everyday are not a coincidence. The amazing thing is DDG itself is a mediocre search engine so I don't really understand what all this fuss is about anyway.

sctb 8y ago
I don't want to call you paranoid... but the guidelines ask you to please not post like this and email us instead. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

utopcell 8y ago

DuckDuckGo was a thin layer of perl scripts written by a single programmer, a wrapper around Yahoo's Search-as-a-Service (YBoSS.) When Yahoo shut down search and started serving Bing results, a YBoSS derivative was grand-fathered into the deal and DDG continued existing. I would not stake the future of my company on such a deal. This is why I believe DDG is now using Yandex in addition to Bing for serving results. The underlying question behind all privacy issues is that of trust. In this particular case, the question is: Would you trust Google, a company that has delivered real value, has helped democratize access to knowledge at a global scale and has everything to lose if it was revealed that they are misusing sensitive information, or would you trust a tiny wrapper-company that claims to not store your personal information but actually uses a Russian search engine for searching ? If you still went for DDG, what about when they decide to also use Baidu ? Privacy is all about trust. I _trust_ Google. I do not trust a company that spends enormous time in smearing campaigns.

AznHisoka 8y ago
With so much money raised, they have no excuse to build their own crawlers. Its been done by many companies less known.
StanislavPetrov 8y ago
>I _trust_ Google. Not smart. It's not an either/or issue. Nobody with a shred of intelligence trusts any corporation.
yladiz 8y ago
Google has misused information in the past. For example, they used to mine emails from Google Apps accounts for data even though they explicitly said they wouldn't, until it was found out and they stopped. I also disagree that I should trust a company that has provided "value" because I have found value in using Facebook since it lets me connect with people and friends that I otherwise wouldn't be able to, but I distrust them because they make money from my data and have, for example, used the number that was supposed to be used for SMS 2FA for advertising.
Rinzler89 8y ago

jancsika 8y ago

> Though first, if you’re not familiar with DuckDuckGo, we are an Internet privacy company that empowers you to seamlessly take control of your personal information online, without any tradeoffs. For the record: by policy, or by design?

utopcell 8y ago
By accident: Bing (their main backend) would obviously not leak personal information to a third party site such as DDG.

mojuba 8y ago

I like DDG, but claiming that their ads are based only on keywords is just not true. They are at least also based on location. I just tried "dishwasher" and it brings up ads in French from local stores. But this is natural, because without the location most ads would probably be meaningless. The question is then, how far can you go by using the information available only in the user's HTTP request? Can you use the user's OS and device information? Where is the line exactly that DDG doesn't want to cross? Edit: I just realized that the answer is probably: yes DDG can use all available information to improve targeting, but it won't store it.

gmueckl 8y ago
When you use it for ads, but don't store it, how do you prove to your advertisers that you are keeping their contracts and showing the ads to the right target group?
- mojuba 8y ago
  Good question, but I think the pay-per-click model should solve it?
  - gmueckl 8y ago
    If you find enough advertisers that are willing to go for that model, I agree.

blackhaz 8y ago

I'll probably be downvoted to hell, but I have to say this. I'm Ukrainian, so I have bias against anything related to Russian government, especially services pretending to be improving my privacy. So, my question is, what is DuckDuckGo's relationship to Yandex, a company fully controlled by Russian government and having track record sharing personal information with Russian security services?

JCSato 8y ago
Are. . .you aware of some relationship between the two? I don't think I've ever heard of them being linked.
- 43920 8y ago
  DuckDuckGo has a deal with Yandex to display search results from them on some searches. If you search for something in Russian, you'll see a "in partnership with Yandex" message in the corner of the search results page.
  - gmueckl 8y ago
    Can you narrow the set of search engines from which the results are pulled?
    - detaro 8y ago
      no, they don't expose the sources.
  - JCSato 8y ago
    Ah, thank you for explaining.
nickpsecurity 8y ago
DuckDuckGo seems to be a metasearch engine that pulls from other sources and integrates the results somehow. It mainly uses Bing/Yahoo search. Yandex is also one of its sources. It shouldn't have a lot of risk if it's anonymizing the data sent to Yandex. I think there's bigger risk in network-level hacks of Ukraine by Russia where they could look at traffic directly or via stolen logs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metasearch_engine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metasearch_engine https://duck.co/help/results/sources https://duck.co/help/results/sources

ing33k 8y ago

I am getting targeted promoted tweet on Twitter for the same quora question.

Lurkars 8y ago

I switched about two years ago and do not miss any Google stuff. I think one very important point is persistent search: if I type in a query in my browser, I get the exact same result as in p.e. in my moms browser. A things that is so annoying in Google, because even an incognito browser give personalised search result. So the experience in fast finding tech help in Google can inverse on an non techy device. Using ddg: always same experience. A feature you don't want to miss, if you often use other devices, like helping friends and family.

__initbrian__ 8y ago
I generally agree. I'd like the same search to return the same results. But I bet there are things I'd be willing for it to be different. I can only think of 'food near me' though
- Lurkars 8y ago
  Of course, it wasn't meant too generally. I also don't want to get the same results over years p.e. To summarize: I strongly prefere non personalized results, persistence was the wrong term here. So "food near me" should give us the same results, when we're at the same place (& nearly same time).

losvedir 8y ago

> Alarmingly, Google now deploys hidden trackers on 76% of websites across the web to monitor your behavior Is this referring to Google Analytics? If so, I feel like "Google deploys" isn't quite fair compared to "Google's tracker is deployed" or something to that effect. But in any case, the phrasing is confusing enough to me to post here, since I want to know if it means something other than GA, which I understand and can block with uMatrix.

piyush_soni 8y ago
This is the CEO of DDG deliberately spreading FUD to innocent people on platforms like Quora in my book. And he's a regular visitor there hijacking many threads promoting his business. I reported his out of place promotional answers once or twice, saying if the CEO of a company is spamming, will it not count as a spam (as opposed to normal people)? Quora didn't remove the answer, for some reason. This one is of course a slightly relevant answer here, but again with his usual dose of competitor bashing and spreading FUD that is a little out of taste for me personally. Also, may be he's speaking it just for the sake of promotion and doesn't take it too seriously himself, but the quality of search results can definitely be greatly improved when you know more about a person than just their search keywords (or even their country). If he actually believes what he says on Quora, I won't place my bet on his business doing too great in the future. 1. The first example (what he writes in his answer) - when I type "dishwasher" in DDG, every shopping website it lists on the first page is from USA, and I don't even live in the same continent. Even when I enable my country results through the button shown on top of the page, the shopping websites are not even the top ones in my country. When I type that in Google, it lists not only the top e-sellers in the country, the most popular local stores in my area as well. What will the advertisers achieve when they don't even know which place I live in? Who will sell me that dishwasher? 2. When I type Zoo, it's pretty damn clear I want to search a zoo in my area. DDG's results even when country is enabled are plain stupid. Write in Google, and it tells me exactly what I want to know. 3. When I type 'Jaguar' in the search box, all top link results are of the Jaguar car, but all the top image results are the Jaguar animal. Google is much more consistent here. I can give tens of examples of why personalization of search results is not that bad an idea for the value it adds. Of course, there are very important negative side effects to it, and that's why we have DDG. But I would have respected his opinion much more had he acknowledged that personalization of search results adds a great value, but also has other consequences, like any balanced personal who can see both sides of a coin.

ydushyant 8y ago

i switched to DDG like 6 months ago, i really like it & i dont plan to go back to google