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?
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.