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This. I always sort of hoped that Apple would either enter the market at some point or acquire DuckDuckGo and try to build out to a larger user base. I realis

This. I always sort of hoped that Apple would either enter the market at some point or acquire DuckDuckGo and try to build out to a larger user base. I realise this is pretty unrealistic, as I'm sure there are far more people out there who would much prefer DDG to remain independent of a megacorp. I assumed the reason Apple haven't entered the market is that there's likely no way to make money at it without becoming Google, so it would cause them to have two diametrically opposed privacy stances in their business (and because they'd have a long road to build a worthy competitor).

mgh2 5y ago
Is there a way to run a profitable search engine without relying on advertising? Ex: Cloud search - https://aws.amazon.com/cloudsearch/ https://aws.amazon.com/cloudsearch/
- matkoniecz 5y ago
  https://kagi.com/ https://kagi.com/ has plans for subscriptions, I hope that they will have product worth paying for. I spend enough time and effort searching that paying 50$/month[0] would make sense if it would get me clearly superior tool. [0] for reference, I pay 250$/month for place where I live (in Poland).
  - eitland 5y ago
    With the usual disclaimer about my Google experience not being anyone elses Google experience: For my work Kagi is already beating Google. In fact there is is almost no competition, it is almost as if they are in completely different leagues: In one month I have once gone back to find something in Google that Kagi couldn't find. For every other query the results have been so good that I haven't even bothered to check. For comparison, if I use Google I always find myself tweaking my queries or trying with DDG or even marginalia in weird cases, and the same with DDG.
    - utopcell 5y ago
      From Kagi's FAQ: "Our searching includes anonymized requests to traditional search indexes like Google and Bing as well as vertical sources like Wikipedia and DeepL or other APIs. We also have our own non-commercial index (Teclis), news index (TinyGem), and an AI for instant answers." So, apparently Kagi is scraping Google and Bing results via a browser extension. Is this legal ?
      - eitland 5y ago
        My interpretation of this is they pay for API access and sends anonymised queries to Google and/or Bing. I'm still puzzled how they get so extremely much better results compared to using any of thise directly or using DDG which does the same only with Bing. Also a bit worried because I think there was a time when DDG felt the same before they suddenly gave in and started serving answers for queries I didn't ask just like Google but I'm not really sure.
      - freediver 5y ago
        Anonymized request means that the client's IP is not passed to the server. Since both search engine have a paid search results API, it is enough to simply proxy the API request to achieve this claim. Kagi is both paying Google for API access and using Google infrastructure (GCP), helping Google make revenue that is not ad-supported.
      - MomoXenosaga 5y ago
        I use startpage.com that does the same. It's just a proxy for Google search.
      - utopcell 5y ago
        They are paying for results, that seems fair and fully disclosed in their FAQ. I'd be curious to see how it performs (waiting for an invite).
    - endisneigh 5y ago
      Do you have example queries to share? I’m curious.
  - wakeupcall 5y ago
    I've been using kagi after requesting an invite, which is something I usually don't even bother doing. Mostly because I'm extremely disappointed by queries not matching my search terms in all major engines - so I have essentially nowhere else to go. It's ok so far. Looking at only search (ignoring the "lenses" and listicle-like content) I cannot say it's objectively better than using searx with filtering. At least not dramatically better that I would notice. It is however much better in returning results that actually contain my search terms. For 600$ a year, it would need to offer full-text regex search and/or exact logical operators with controllable approximation (agrep-style). I would instantly pay 5/mo$ already though, as long as it stays BS free, and doesn't use past search results to refine further queries. Search bubble is an issue in every single service where this is being used, and I'd like my search engine to be totally exempt from it, and/or have exact control over it.
- streamofdigits 5y ago
  there is also xapian/recoll https://xapian.org/ https://xapian.org/ which works great for "desktop" search
modo_mario 5y ago
Doesn't duckduckgo just mostly use microsoft's search results?
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

mgh2 5y ago

Is there a way to run a profitable search engine without relying on advertising? Ex: Cloud search - https://aws.amazon.com/cloudsearch/ https://aws.amazon.com/cloudsearch/

matkoniecz 5y ago
https://kagi.com/ https://kagi.com/ has plans for subscriptions, I hope that they will have product worth paying for. I spend enough time and effort searching that paying 50$/month[0] would make sense if it would get me clearly superior tool. [0] for reference, I pay 250$/month for place where I live (in Poland).
- eitland 5y ago
  With the usual disclaimer about my Google experience not being anyone elses Google experience: For my work Kagi is already beating Google. In fact there is is almost no competition, it is almost as if they are in completely different leagues: In one month I have once gone back to find something in Google that Kagi couldn't find. For every other query the results have been so good that I haven't even bothered to check. For comparison, if I use Google I always find myself tweaking my queries or trying with DDG or even marginalia in weird cases, and the same with DDG.
  - utopcell 5y ago
    From Kagi's FAQ: "Our searching includes anonymized requests to traditional search indexes like Google and Bing as well as vertical sources like Wikipedia and DeepL or other APIs. We also have our own non-commercial index (Teclis), news index (TinyGem), and an AI for instant answers." So, apparently Kagi is scraping Google and Bing results via a browser extension. Is this legal ?
    - eitland 5y ago
      My interpretation of this is they pay for API access and sends anonymised queries to Google and/or Bing. I'm still puzzled how they get so extremely much better results compared to using any of thise directly or using DDG which does the same only with Bing. Also a bit worried because I think there was a time when DDG felt the same before they suddenly gave in and started serving answers for queries I didn't ask just like Google but I'm not really sure.
    - freediver 5y ago
      Anonymized request means that the client's IP is not passed to the server. Since both search engine have a paid search results API, it is enough to simply proxy the API request to achieve this claim. Kagi is both paying Google for API access and using Google infrastructure (GCP), helping Google make revenue that is not ad-supported.
    - MomoXenosaga 5y ago
      I use startpage.com that does the same. It's just a proxy for Google search.
    - utopcell 5y ago
      They are paying for results, that seems fair and fully disclosed in their FAQ. I'd be curious to see how it performs (waiting for an invite).
  - endisneigh 5y ago
    Do you have example queries to share? I’m curious.
- wakeupcall 5y ago
  I've been using kagi after requesting an invite, which is something I usually don't even bother doing. Mostly because I'm extremely disappointed by queries not matching my search terms in all major engines - so I have essentially nowhere else to go. It's ok so far. Looking at only search (ignoring the "lenses" and listicle-like content) I cannot say it's objectively better than using searx with filtering. At least not dramatically better that I would notice. It is however much better in returning results that actually contain my search terms. For 600$ a year, it would need to offer full-text regex search and/or exact logical operators with controllable approximation (agrep-style). I would instantly pay 5/mo$ already though, as long as it stays BS free, and doesn't use past search results to refine further queries. Search bubble is an issue in every single service where this is being used, and I'd like my search engine to be totally exempt from it, and/or have exact control over it.
streamofdigits 5y ago
there is also xapian/recoll https://xapian.org/ https://xapian.org/ which works great for "desktop" search

modo_mario 5y ago

Doesn't duckduckgo just mostly use microsoft's search results?

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]