A viable business model. DDG has done a spectacular job of navigating the search space with arguably a very good product and look at how long it has taken them

A viable business model. DDG has done a spectacular job of navigating the search space with arguably a very good product and look at how long it has taken them to get as far as they have. There isn't likely room for a 2nd DDG-type approach. Setting aside all of the specifics related to building and running the engine itself, how do you make money doing it? Unless you are servicing a very specialized and lucrative vertical that doesn't mind paying, everyone else gets their search results for free so you generally can't charge users for it. This typically leaves advertising (which Google arguably owns the market for re: search) and/or selling user data (which is both unpopular with users and depending on jurisdiction, illegal). Figure out a new way to monetize search and you may have something... This is a problem with today's world dominated by mega-tech companies: to compete in many areas of it you need to essentially be a monopolist in some other area so you can afford to compete in something like search as a loss leader at least until you get established. Look at how much Microsoft spent on Bing[1]... and they got how much of the market? Facebook wasn't initially profitable either, but they had a distinctly different approach to aggregating a pool of data Google couldn't search and users they couldn't monetize. [1] https://money.cnn.com/2011/09/20/technology/microsoft_bing/index.htm?source=cnn_bin https://money.cnn.com/2011/09/20/technology/microsoft_bing/i...