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If Bing ever drops DuckDuckGo, will there be a search engine they can fall back on?

by TekMol 6y ago

02020202 6y ago
they use bing only for some stuff, not as their backend. they will do just fine without bing.
- ffpip 6y ago
  Do you have any source? They have always avoided the question of how much they were dependent on Bing.
  - notRobot 6y ago
    AFAICT, other than those information boxes that turn up on the top of searches, the actual search results are almost entirely powerer by bing, although as you said, they've always dodged the question.
  - mrweasel 6y ago
    No one has a source for “DuckDuckGo is just Bing” either. We know that they use Bing, but not for what, people have just asserted that DDG is just Bing (or Yandex), but no one seems to be able to provide at source to back up the claim.
    - pb7 6y ago
      >To do that, DuckDuckGo gets its results from over four hundred sources. These include hundreds of vertical sources delivering niche Instant Answers, DuckDuckBot (our crawler) and crowd-sourced sites (like Wikipedia, stored in our answer indexes). We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we also source from multiple partners, though most commonly from Bing (and none from Google).[0] Seems pretty clear their standard search results come from Bing. It even used to say "multiple partners like Bing, Yahoo, etc" but Yahoo was also powered by Bing. They like to change the wording to make themselves sound less reliant on Bing even though if Bing were to cut off access, DuckDuckGo would immediately cease working. [0] https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/sources/ https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/so...
      - mrweasel 6y ago
        I’ve read that multiple times, and no, that’s not clear. At best we can read it as “Results from Bing are mixed into their search results”. Most likely a high percentage, but we don’t know.
        pb7 6y ago
        Mission accomplished then because they don't want to make it clear. If you really care that much, go back through all the different revisions of that statement through the Internet Archive and see how many times they've been dancing around saying the exact same thing: it's just fucking Bing. Their own crawler returns results for very specific limited topics in their segregated boxes. If they had even one source for one specific query, say "purple cats" that they didn't use Bing for, they could technically claim it's only "mostly" Bing.
    - sct202 6y ago
      We can infer some things about DDG based published data on crawler and bot activity. DDG's index is pretty comparable to both Google and Bing, but their bot is no where to be found in activity stats. So it's pretty reasonable to think that at minimum their index is primarily derived from 3rd parties. https://deviceatlas.com/blog/most-active-bots-and-crawlers-web https://deviceatlas.com/blog/most-active-bots-and-crawlers-w... https://www.imperva.com/blog/most-active-good-bots/ https://www.imperva.com/blog/most-active-good-bots/ In my opinion, I don't think it should matter too much that they might not be crawling for their own index as long as they're reordering the results. But I do think there is some stigma where metasearch engines aren't looked at with as much prestige.
      - the-rc 6y ago
        What kind of ranking can you do for a page on the internet if you didn't crawl its contents? It has to rely on other signals.
- lights0123 6y ago
  I mean, searching something on DDG and then on Bing gives almost identical results.
  - Retric 6y ago
    Just did a search for tempest on bing, duck duck go, and google, and ddg was closer to google than bing. Which is fairly common, they are each the odd one out on some searches. Though I think google’s personalized search results make it seem very different to some people. Pick something really odd like “Purple car teacup” and google seems to give really bad results. 3 links to amazon, 2 to Pinterest, and 2 to EBay. They all link to thepurpleteacup.com, but only google has a Yoycart link, it also wants to replace car with cat. I think Bing started off with the best image search and ddg the worst, though bing wanted to ignore teacup for the bottom half of it’s results.
    - mda 6y ago
      Try a more complex query. e.g. "difference between wet and dry suit" bing and ddg web site results are almost identical, only ranking differences. Youtube results on the page are identical. Google is quite different. "average temperature of a dog" Again bing ddg very similar, Google completely different. "average lifespan of a domestic cat" "list of medication that has interactions with grapefruit". Just try more complex theories. The importance of ddg / bing relation is something they specifically and actively try to hide behind smoke and mirrors.
      - Retric 6y ago
        “average temperature of a dog“ Bing and ddg are somewhat closer, but far from identical. Include the second page of googles results, and all three have vetinfo.com etc, but bing and google have two links to www.quora.com where ddg doesn’t have any. I only bring that up because of you compare results under the assumption that bing and ddg are identical it’s easy to overstate the similarities.
        philistine 6y ago
- speedgoose 6y ago
  It's difficult to say as they are not open about it. Personally, I think they would suffer. Their API https://duckduckgo.com/api https://duckduckgo.com/api shows what they can provide as result. I believe the reason why it's missing a lot, most of the actual results, is because Microsoft Bing doesn't allow to offer a public API to redistribute the results from the Bing API.
ffpip 6y ago
That's my main concern. Duckduckgo is used more than Bing in many countries and Microsoft might just cancel their access some day. There is always Yandex I guess
- luckylion 6y ago
  Why would Bing cancel, they're presumably making money off of the arrangement. And DDG-users would likely not migrate to Bing, but to Google: if you have to use a product by an anti-privacy-corporation, might as well use the good one.
  - ffpip 6y ago
    Well, the fact that DDG gets more users than Bing would be embarrassing for Bing.
    - willio58 6y ago
      Eh, was it embarrassing when Chrome was built on Webkit and they had more usage than Safari? I don't think so.
  - mistermann 6y ago
    Someone might strongly suggest the idea to them.
  - adammenges 6y ago
    Your google point is pretty valid, they’d be removing a source of income and sending users to a competitor. I think DDG is fine for the time being.
  - indigochill 6y ago
    >might as well use the good one While I do believe Google has the superior search engine, there may also be an argument for denying them the "vertical integration of identity". That is, if you use Gmail and Google Search, Google can figure out more about you (in theory) than if you use just Gmail. Same reason I never -ever- use Facebook SSO for logging into non-Facebook sites.
chris_f 6y ago
Gigablast, Mojeek, and Yandex (already a source of DDG results in Russia I believe) all have their own search indexes and APIs to access them. For a completely independent search engine, Gigabalst is surprisingly good in terms of index and relevance. Not as good as Google or Bing, but I think it is a one-man operation. Mojeek also just received an investment to build out their index. At Runnaroo, I partially use Google as the backend, but I have done a good amount of testing on the above options in case Google or Bing stop being options. Just as important as the search results, Bing provides the monetization for DDG through their ad network, so DDG is dependent on Bing for two critical parts of the business. I don't think Bing will ever kick them off because it must be very profitable for them and they need to do everything they can to get marketshare against Google.
jahnu 6y ago
https://www.qwant.com/ https://www.qwant.com/ Isn't bad
- Dahoon 6y ago
  Better than DDG..

If Bing ever drops DuckDuckGo, will there be a search engine they can fall back on?

by TekMol 6y ago

If Bing ever drops DuckDuckGo, will there be a search engine they can fall back on?

02020202 6y ago

they use bing only for some stuff, not as their backend. they will do just fine without bing.

ffpip 6y ago
Do you have any source? They have always avoided the question of how much they were dependent on Bing.
- notRobot 6y ago
  AFAICT, other than those information boxes that turn up on the top of searches, the actual search results are almost entirely powerer by bing, although as you said, they've always dodged the question.
- mrweasel 6y ago
  No one has a source for “DuckDuckGo is just Bing” either. We know that they use Bing, but not for what, people have just asserted that DDG is just Bing (or Yandex), but no one seems to be able to provide at source to back up the claim.
  - pb7 6y ago
    >To do that, DuckDuckGo gets its results from over four hundred sources. These include hundreds of vertical sources delivering niche Instant Answers, DuckDuckBot (our crawler) and crowd-sourced sites (like Wikipedia, stored in our answer indexes). We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we also source from multiple partners, though most commonly from Bing (and none from Google).[0] Seems pretty clear their standard search results come from Bing. It even used to say "multiple partners like Bing, Yahoo, etc" but Yahoo was also powered by Bing. They like to change the wording to make themselves sound less reliant on Bing even though if Bing were to cut off access, DuckDuckGo would immediately cease working. [0] https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/sources/ https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/so...
    - mrweasel 6y ago
      I’ve read that multiple times, and no, that’s not clear. At best we can read it as “Results from Bing are mixed into their search results”. Most likely a high percentage, but we don’t know.
      - pb7 6y ago
        Mission accomplished then because they don't want to make it clear. If you really care that much, go back through all the different revisions of that statement through the Internet Archive and see how many times they've been dancing around saying the exact same thing: it's just fucking Bing. Their own crawler returns results for very specific limited topics in their segregated boxes. If they had even one source for one specific query, say "purple cats" that they didn't use Bing for, they could technically claim it's only "mostly" Bing.
  - sct202 6y ago
    We can infer some things about DDG based published data on crawler and bot activity. DDG's index is pretty comparable to both Google and Bing, but their bot is no where to be found in activity stats. So it's pretty reasonable to think that at minimum their index is primarily derived from 3rd parties. https://deviceatlas.com/blog/most-active-bots-and-crawlers-web https://deviceatlas.com/blog/most-active-bots-and-crawlers-w... https://www.imperva.com/blog/most-active-good-bots/ https://www.imperva.com/blog/most-active-good-bots/ In my opinion, I don't think it should matter too much that they might not be crawling for their own index as long as they're reordering the results. But I do think there is some stigma where metasearch engines aren't looked at with as much prestige.
    - the-rc 6y ago
      What kind of ranking can you do for a page on the internet if you didn't crawl its contents? It has to rely on other signals.
lights0123 6y ago
I mean, searching something on DDG and then on Bing gives almost identical results.
- Retric 6y ago
  Just did a search for tempest on bing, duck duck go, and google, and ddg was closer to google than bing. Which is fairly common, they are each the odd one out on some searches. Though I think google’s personalized search results make it seem very different to some people. Pick something really odd like “Purple car teacup” and google seems to give really bad results. 3 links to amazon, 2 to Pinterest, and 2 to EBay. They all link to thepurpleteacup.com, but only google has a Yoycart link, it also wants to replace car with cat. I think Bing started off with the best image search and ddg the worst, though bing wanted to ignore teacup for the bottom half of it’s results.
  - mda 6y ago
    Try a more complex query. e.g. "difference between wet and dry suit" bing and ddg web site results are almost identical, only ranking differences. Youtube results on the page are identical. Google is quite different. "average temperature of a dog" Again bing ddg very similar, Google completely different. "average lifespan of a domestic cat" "list of medication that has interactions with grapefruit". Just try more complex theories. The importance of ddg / bing relation is something they specifically and actively try to hide behind smoke and mirrors.
    - Retric 6y ago
      “average temperature of a dog“ Bing and ddg are somewhat closer, but far from identical. Include the second page of googles results, and all three have vetinfo.com etc, but bing and google have two links to www.quora.com where ddg doesn’t have any. I only bring that up because of you compare results under the assumption that bing and ddg are identical it’s easy to overstate the similarities.
      - philistine 6y ago
speedgoose 6y ago
It's difficult to say as they are not open about it. Personally, I think they would suffer. Their API https://duckduckgo.com/api https://duckduckgo.com/api shows what they can provide as result. I believe the reason why it's missing a lot, most of the actual results, is because Microsoft Bing doesn't allow to offer a public API to redistribute the results from the Bing API.

ffpip 6y ago

That's my main concern. Duckduckgo is used more than Bing in many countries and Microsoft might just cancel their access some day. There is always Yandex I guess

luckylion 6y ago
Why would Bing cancel, they're presumably making money off of the arrangement. And DDG-users would likely not migrate to Bing, but to Google: if you have to use a product by an anti-privacy-corporation, might as well use the good one.
- ffpip 6y ago
  Well, the fact that DDG gets more users than Bing would be embarrassing for Bing.
  - willio58 6y ago
    Eh, was it embarrassing when Chrome was built on Webkit and they had more usage than Safari? I don't think so.
- mistermann 6y ago
  Someone might strongly suggest the idea to them.
- adammenges 6y ago
  Your google point is pretty valid, they’d be removing a source of income and sending users to a competitor. I think DDG is fine for the time being.
- indigochill 6y ago
  >might as well use the good one While I do believe Google has the superior search engine, there may also be an argument for denying them the "vertical integration of identity". That is, if you use Gmail and Google Search, Google can figure out more about you (in theory) than if you use just Gmail. Same reason I never -ever- use Facebook SSO for logging into non-Facebook sites.

chris_f 6y ago

Gigablast, Mojeek, and Yandex (already a source of DDG results in Russia I believe) all have their own search indexes and APIs to access them. For a completely independent search engine, Gigabalst is surprisingly good in terms of index and relevance. Not as good as Google or Bing, but I think it is a one-man operation. Mojeek also just received an investment to build out their index. At Runnaroo, I partially use Google as the backend, but I have done a good amount of testing on the above options in case Google or Bing stop being options. Just as important as the search results, Bing provides the monetization for DDG through their ad network, so DDG is dependent on Bing for two critical parts of the business. I don't think Bing will ever kick them off because it must be very profitable for them and they need to do everything they can to get marketshare against Google.

jahnu 6y ago

https://www.qwant.com/ https://www.qwant.com/ Isn't bad

Dahoon 6y ago
Better than DDG..