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This got me thinking...is it possible for Microsoft to secretly buy out DDG and leave them the fuck alone except where they need help(ie. access to Bing index)?
by zaidf 15y ago
This got me thinking...is it possible for Microsoft to secretly buy out DDG and leave them the fuck alone except where they need help(ie. access to Bing index)?
For all the money the Bing unit keeps pouring, I feel buying DDG and leaving them the heck alone can be a reasonable long-term bet with relatively little risk.
The challenge would be to keep the founders/team motivated. They could spin it off as a completely different company on IPO track and give significant equity. But then what if Google wants to buy them out? And of course, the Bing team may have a problem with MSFT creating internal competition though that may just push em to do better.
More likely if DuckDuckGo gets in an acquisition bidding war, I put my money on Gabe passing acquisition for raising a huge funding round that lets him take some money off the table.
With all the flaws(enough that I don't use it), it remains a rare search engine start-up that has its heart in the right place: to actually serve consumers versus build some technology or team and get acquired(looking at you, Powerset).
- motti_s 15y agoHere is something ironic. I bet you many of DDG's users are hackers who use it for privacy reasons. The same hackers who rely on Google Analytics in their own websites. If DuckDuckGo grows to become more than a niche search engine, the same hackers who use it will have to reinvent Analytics somehow. This is reason #1 why DDG will stay small. Reason #2 is that if necessary, a DuckDuckGoogle can be created in an afternoon's worth of effort in Mountain View.
- zaidf 15y agoReason #2 is that if necessary, a DuckDuckGoogle can be created in an afternoon's worth of effort in Mountain View. I can't tell how serious you are with that statement.
- eurleif 15y agoI don't understand your line of reasoning. Yes, Google Analytics is useful, and we would have to replace it if Google the company went out of business or discontinued it, but why is that going to motivate people to use Google the search engine?
- guimarin 15y agoI think you're getting ahead of yourself here. DDG has 0.1% of all search traffic ( 30m out of 23b queries per month ). They get all of their 'relevancy' from bing, and blekko. The reason you like them is because they clean up these results, provide peripheral add-ons like user privacy, no ads, easier syntax for power users, and one-boxes which function more as a knowledge-base than a search engine. They don't crawl/index the web. or if they do, we haven't heard anything about it, or seen any different relevancy rankings from the BOSS api. So they are really a new face to already extant search engines. You mention a 'bidding war'. Who would buy them? Any 'features' they provide can be copied by msft/google if they feel threatened. They don't have their own backend search technology so partners who might want to do search with them, ask.com, search.com, etc. have no reason to work with them as opposed to the BOSS api themselves or even Bing. I'm just as excited as you are about innovation in search and competitors to google, but DDG needs to be re-architected on the back-end before these sorts of pronouncements make sense.
- AznHisoka 15y agoyep, i completely agree. DDG is built off Bing's platform, so they're screwed if MSFT ever made their index private. They also don't got a strong brand outside of hackers who've heard of them. I must admit they do a good job in the PR area of making themselves seem big and sexy. But they're really not innovating search, or providing any thick value in improving search. At least Blekko was trying to create a better algorithm.
- guimarin 15y agoYeah I'm pretty excited when DDG gets to a point where they can start hiring the engineers to build a crawler/indexer, that way they can really start to kickass. As an aside, I still use blekko everyday, and they obliterate google and bing in certain intent queries. If you search for some intent query in these categories: travel, jobs, real estate, cars, finance, legal, medical, services, and merchandise sales AND one of their blekko/user curated slashtags fires/autofires, blekko destroys. ( eg. cure for headaches )
- nextparadigms 15y ago