4 ms·
DDG is just a proxy for bing, that's it. Saying DDG is a search engine is like saying instacart is a supermarket. They are just delivering someone else's busi
by ck2 4y ago
DDG is just a proxy for bing, that's it.
Saying DDG is a search engine is like saying instacart is a supermarket.
They are just delivering someone else's business and could disappear overnight if the source decides to disallow them.
Which brings up the question if computing power, storage and bandwidth has never been cheaper, why are Google and Bing the only two major search engines surviving?
- asldjajlfkj 4y agoThe growth of the internet may well compensate the decreased pricing of compute. Hosting Google of 1999 is much much cheaper now. But hosting contemporary Google ist much much more expensive than hosting Google of 1999 in 1999.
- JasserInicide 4y agowhy are Google and Bing the only two major search engines surviving? Massively high technical barrier to entry, and in Google's case, bullying the little guy with impunity.
- lostmsu 4y agoThe technical side should have become easier since the inception of Google: you can probably beef up a single machine to index the entirety of relevant internet.
- richardsocher 4y agonah, it costs A LOT of money to build an up-to-date index of the web. we're doing it slowly on you.com - one sources/url/app at a time.
- lostmsu 4y agoWhere does your cost come from mostly?
- richardsocher 4y agopeople, machines, crawling, storage, etc.
- sct202 4y agoA lot of the internet is behind semi-walled gardens and GoogleBot and BingBot have preferential access. All the large social sites, Cloudflare, and other CDNs will just stop serving unknown bots after awhile, which is why there are spidering/scraping services that cycle thru IP addresses. See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29417061 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29417061
- bombcar 4y agoSounds like Cloudflare has enough information to become a search engine itself, if it ever wanted to ...
- bombcar 4y agoBecause they're "good enough" and that's all that really matters. To supplant Google you need to be better and that's going to be hard to do (the easiest way is something that Google no doubt blocks - filtering Google results).
- troyvit 4y agoHm I just tried `!imdb wag the dog` on bing and I didn't end up on imdb.com. Instead I got Microsoft's take on that movie and a bunch of other cruft. If by proxy you mean they use bing's index then yeah I guess they do. If you mean they have the same functionality then no, you're wrong.