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I feel like this makes it clear the level of reliance DuckDuckGo has on Bing. I know it's been a bit ambigious the full extent to which they do, and they claim

I feel like this makes it clear the level of reliance DuckDuckGo has on Bing. I know it's been a bit ambigious the full extent to which they do, and they claim to have their own indexer, but there's no way this is a coincidence. Surely if you have your own indexer you would have seen techdirt before? At this moment "techdirt" only returns the wikipedia article, twitter, then mostly unrelated mentions of it. Surely DDG would have seen at least their homepage before? > Most of our search result pages feature one or more Instant Answers. To deliver Instant Answers on specific topics, DuckDuckGo leverages many sources, including specialized sources like Sportradar and crowd-sourced sites like Wikipedia. We also maintain our own crawler (DuckDuckBot) and many indexes to support our results. Of course, we have more traditional links and images in our search results too, which we largely source from Bing. Our focus is synthesizing all these sources to create a superior search experience. https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/sources/ https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/sources...

Brian_K_White 3y ago
A dinky little but long standing staple of it's topic bitchin100.com had the same problem for some years but I guess the community was small enough and traditional enough that not enough people were using anything but google to notice except me. They eventually got it fixed but only after a few other people finally noticed and the owner contacted someone and then waited a week or so. But it was like that for years. You search a perfectly good search term that should pull up one of the articles on that site first, and all you got are all kinds of other 2nd and 3rd hand references like email archive posts and articles on other sites, but scroll down as many pages as you want and the actual site would never come up on ddg. That's when I got interested in Kagi.
Retric 3y ago
DDG’s business model is largely about privacy and UI rather than attempting to be objectively better than other search engines. Search is not quite 1:1 with Bing, but frankly I hate Bing’s UI not its results.
- pb7 3y ago
  They don’t claim to be a privacy wrapper for Bing; they claim to be a standalone search engine. But they aren’t. It’s 99% Bing and there’s nothing they can do about the results getting censored at the origin.
  - Retric 3y ago
    On multiple occasions they have uncensored results that Bing censored. They default to censoring websites when Bing does, but can trivially remove sites from that list. As to their businesses proposition privacy was central from day 1: In 2011, Weinberg, then the company’s sole employee, took out an ad on a billboard in San Francisco that declared, “Google tracks you. We don’t.” That branding—Google, but private—has served the company well in the years since. “The only way to compete with Google is not to try to compete on search results,” says Brad Burnham, a partner at Union Square Ventures, which gave DuckDuckGo its first and only Series A funding in 2011. https://www.wired.com/story/duckduckgo-quest-prove-online-privacy-possible/ https://www.wired.com/story/duckduckgo-quest-prove-online-pr...
    - pb7 3y ago
      In other words, you’re seeing results that Bing wants you to see unless it raises a big enough stink for DDG to manually override. They default to being a wrapper for Bing. Edit: Since you edited, no one is arguing that their whole spiel isn’t about privacy. What I’m saying is that they refuse to admit that they’re a privacy wrapper around Bing which would make their value proposition quite weak. They puff their chest and pretend to be a big standalone player in the market but they aren’t. You aren’t at the whims of DDG as a user, but at those of Bing/Microsoft. If you’re cool with that, carry on, but I’m not going to let yegg continue to make vague statements uncontested. If they’re so sketchy and dishonest about their role in deciding the links, what else are they dishonest about? Some of you let a lot slide because they’re the underdog.
      - Retric 3y ago
        That’s not a question of being a wrapper, it’s a question of using Bing’s spam list. The difference is about sites Bing doesn’t include but also doesn’t specifically exclude. PS: As to your edit, they have specifically mentioned using Bing in the past alongside other engines. They are clearly running their own search process and widgets while also using a lot of data from Bing. I can see why you might consider it deceptive, though I really don’t.

Brian_K_White 3y ago

A dinky little but long standing staple of it's topic bitchin100.com had the same problem for some years but I guess the community was small enough and traditional enough that not enough people were using anything but google to notice except me. They eventually got it fixed but only after a few other people finally noticed and the owner contacted someone and then waited a week or so. But it was like that for years. You search a perfectly good search term that should pull up one of the articles on that site first, and all you got are all kinds of other 2nd and 3rd hand references like email archive posts and articles on other sites, but scroll down as many pages as you want and the actual site would never come up on ddg. That's when I got interested in Kagi.

Retric 3y ago

DDG’s business model is largely about privacy and UI rather than attempting to be objectively better than other search engines. Search is not quite 1:1 with Bing, but frankly I hate Bing’s UI not its results.

pb7 3y ago
They don’t claim to be a privacy wrapper for Bing; they claim to be a standalone search engine. But they aren’t. It’s 99% Bing and there’s nothing they can do about the results getting censored at the origin.
- Retric 3y ago
  On multiple occasions they have uncensored results that Bing censored. They default to censoring websites when Bing does, but can trivially remove sites from that list. As to their businesses proposition privacy was central from day 1: In 2011, Weinberg, then the company’s sole employee, took out an ad on a billboard in San Francisco that declared, “Google tracks you. We don’t.” That branding—Google, but private—has served the company well in the years since. “The only way to compete with Google is not to try to compete on search results,” says Brad Burnham, a partner at Union Square Ventures, which gave DuckDuckGo its first and only Series A funding in 2011. https://www.wired.com/story/duckduckgo-quest-prove-online-privacy-possible/ https://www.wired.com/story/duckduckgo-quest-prove-online-pr...
  - pb7 3y ago
    In other words, you’re seeing results that Bing wants you to see unless it raises a big enough stink for DDG to manually override. They default to being a wrapper for Bing. Edit: Since you edited, no one is arguing that their whole spiel isn’t about privacy. What I’m saying is that they refuse to admit that they’re a privacy wrapper around Bing which would make their value proposition quite weak. They puff their chest and pretend to be a big standalone player in the market but they aren’t. You aren’t at the whims of DDG as a user, but at those of Bing/Microsoft. If you’re cool with that, carry on, but I’m not going to let yegg continue to make vague statements uncontested. If they’re so sketchy and dishonest about their role in deciding the links, what else are they dishonest about? Some of you let a lot slide because they’re the underdog.
    - Retric 3y ago
      That’s not a question of being a wrapper, it’s a question of using Bing’s spam list. The difference is about sites Bing doesn’t include but also doesn’t specifically exclude. PS: As to your edit, they have specifically mentioned using Bing in the past alongside other engines. They are clearly running their own search process and widgets while also using a lot of data from Bing. I can see why you might consider it deceptive, though I really don’t.