3 ms·
Yeah, search results are provided by Bing.
by luhn 7y ago
Yeah, search results are provided by Bing.
- krick 7y agoWow, I didn't know that. So what exactly is a DDG then? Just a page to query Bing (anonymously?)? They don't crawl any data themselves?
- pb7 7y agoYep. They do a small amount of crawling solely to populate their "instant answers" for limited topics.
- sansnomme 7y agoTheir marketing and brand are the most important aspects. Bing proxies are a-dime-a-dozen but only DuckDuckGo has achieved tremendous media attention and funding.
- moretai 7y agoTheir marketing got me. I was duped.
- pb7 7y agoOne of the proxies had to win out, right? We're only talking about DuckDuckGo and not BearBearClaw because they survived. I don't think they're doing anything particularly special. They're also a much older company with a lot smaller search volume than people realize.
- moretai 7y agoSo I could just make a DDG?
- pb7 7y agoYou sure could. But DDG is a decade old company and its total lifetime searches amount to less than a week's worth of Google searches so it's likely your efforts will be in vain.
- sansnomme 7y agoIf you are willing to spend a decade marketing privacy features and bashing the establishment, yes. They are not Google-style "tech disrupters". One could say their success is as much a product of Edward Snowden's revelations and the subsequent societal shift towards tracking-as-a-liability as much as actual technology. Don't get me wrong, their UI gimmicks like !g are nothing to be scoffed at. UI has value, just ask Robinhood and Stripe. But DuckDuckGo is certainly not "hard tech".
- chibg10 7y agoI don’t think GP’s claim is entirely accurate. Bing is an input into the results, along with other inputs (Bing is less than majority responsible in most cases iirc). I don’t remember if DDG does any indexing on it’s own. Hopefully someone more informed can chime in but GP’s claim was strong, provocative, and to my knowledge inaccurate so wanted to correct it.
- modzu 7y agoyes DDG is a 'metacrawler' (for you old timers out there); it uses approximately 100 search sources: https://web.archive.org/web/20150124074006/https://duck.co/help/results/sources https://web.archive.org/web/20150124074006/https://duck.co/h...
- gramakri 7y agoWow, this is news to me.
- samstave 7y ago"So, what exactly is it you'd say you do around here?" So -- What is DDG's value to me, as I have switched over to Brave Browser+DDG+protonMail for as much of everything I can. (Also of note, there are sites that do NOT accept @protonmail as a valid email address :-/)
- shaneprrlt 7y agoThey have their own crawler they mention, they mention Bing as a source, but I think that's mostly for search ads.