Does DuckDuckGo pay for the Bing engine? And what happens if Microsoft tries to stop them from using it, or they put some limitations on it for 3rd parties?
The details of DDG's arrangement with Bing are obviously not public. However, it is a very safe bet that DDG either gets the information for free, or essentially for free, simply because to do otherwise would make no sense for Microsoft. Microsoft benefits from anything that even potentially reduces Google's market share, by any amount.
Of course, that puts DDG in a dangerous situation, since it depends on Microsoft. Perhaps it has a long-term binding commitment from Microsoft, though, that wouldn't surprise me either.
From the genius who brought us what Google adapted as AdSense. I applaud this effort. I'm no Spike Lee, but in my opinion this is doing the right thing.
Let people compete over what to do with the raw data (data which is of course publicly accessible but subject to the strange inequities of crawling), how best to process and present it, not over access to it. DDG has to pay Yahoo! for a BOSS license. That is just strange when you think about how the raw data was obtained. It is publicly available information.
Nothing against Yahoo! for doing that (selling access to publicly available data), as there are many other examples of this practice across web- "everyone else is doing it". But I do not think it is "the right thing" to do.
Maybe the question is not why you have to pay for your car, but why you _do not_ have to pay to view information via a website, store a copy of this in RAM and/or save a copy using secondary storage. Why is it typically "free" for you to do that?
Why the :/ ? DDG isn't taking away anyone _else's_ affiliation, right? This isn't really any different than leaving the referer-id in there, except that it shoehorns "referer" into the "affiliate" api that Amazon et al are geared to pay money for. (Right?)
They just use yahoo/bing/google results and redo the links where they're an affiliate. Which means the search rankings are decided by a third party who has no hand in the affiliate pot.
The only downside to DuckDuckGo is that the results it gives for some searches of friends names are extremely stale pulling up old mailing list posts from 2006/2007 rather than showing their new content from their personal blog. There seems to be a ridiculous amount of noise mixed in with signal which makes it a no-go for me or for even suggesting it to my family.
Is it like a Tor for search engine where all the searches are performed by DuckDuckGo, keeping the users away from tracking? I tried searching some terms and it gives results pretty fast.I found no ads in their search results,wondering how these guys are getting money to share their revenue with Linux Mint and also pay MS for using Bing data. Making me doubt they might push favorable content up.
yup there is a minimal ad on the side. I didn't appeared for the few queries I had tried (people names). I tried searching for a laptop and there came the ad on the side ;-)
My god, it's yet another piece of software called Mint. Stop the branding madness!
Also frustrating is the fact that I couldn't spot the link from the official Linux Mint blog to the "please tell me what Linux Mint is" page. I ultimately resorted to Google. A conversion funnel tragedy.
Linux Mint was first released in 2006, so it's not hopping on some "name our software product Mint" bandwagon.
> Also frustrating is the fact that I couldn't spot the link from the official Linux Mint blog to the [. . .]
Yes, this is a common and frustrating mistake. There's a bunch of stuff that I haven't bothered investigating because I get sent to a blog but can't be bothered to web-search for the product when there's no link.
> Also frustrating is the fact that I couldn't spot the link from the official Linux Mint blog to the "please tell me what Linux Mint is" page.
Yes, it's incomprehensible why so many companies: a) don't use their normal headers for the blog, or at least b) put a prominent link back to the homepage (like the logo, for instance).
I think the poster was commenting on the difficulty of getting to the main web site, not the possibility. Having visitors hand-edit URIs is not considered slick customer conversion.
My last information was that they used a combination of third party search APIs (Yahoo, Bing, Google) and producing their own search content.
By now, in terms of functionality[1], I mostly use DDG for the bangs, having set it as my default search engine in Firefox (keyword.URL in about:settings) so I can search using the URL bar. I caught myself doing ^T and typing "!w keywords" (to search wikipedia) on other people's computers more than once by now.
[1] I originally switched because I'm very privacy conscious, and that's still my most powerful argument for using DDG, but it's by far not the only strong argument for duckgo'ing instead of googling.
> I caught myself doing ^T and typing "!w keywords" (to search wikipedia) on other people's computers more than once by now.
You realize that you don't have to use DDG for this, right? You can set up keyword searches in the search bar in Firefox or Chrome (don't know about other browsers) for any site, not just those that DDG supports. Then just type 'w <search>' into the location bar and hit enter for Wikipedia, for example. You can even do cool things like set up custom searches, like my 'wl' search, which automatically prepends 'list of' to any Wikpedia search.
I don't see how setting them up is a big deal. Once you know how to do it, you'll use it for just about everything. I'm at the point now where 99% of the websites I visit are accessed via either a keyword search or keyword bookmark (i.e., 'hn' for http://hackerne.ws/). Combined with Pentadactyl (Vim emulator) in Firefox, I browse so fast that the only thing that holds me back is how dog-slow the Firefox UI gets unless you regularly create a new profile and "start fresh" every couple of months. But I try to keep all my stuff in the cloud (bookmarks in Xmarks, passwords in LastPass) so that this is fairly painless.
Besides, it eliminates two keystrokes. Considering the amount of times I look up something on Wikipedia every day, I'd say that it pays itself back in spades.
That's not the same thing as the '!w' feature on DDG or the 'w' keyword bookmark. Once you Google 'wiki <search>', you have to click on the first link. Unless you set up an IFL search, in which case you might as well set up a Wikipedia search.
When you set up IFL search, you can use it for wiki, imdb, documentation, projects' homepages and dozens of other sites that you know you will find in the first spot. I have IFL as my default (w/o keyword) search. When I'm not so sure I just use keyword search (g for google and few others (but not wiki or imdb)).
Which is exactly what my keyword search does. For example, if I type 'w hacker news' into my location bar, I'm instantly redirected to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_news
