[jacquesm]

As much as I like duckduckgo it's not even on the map.

Even Altavista is larger than duckduckgo and they're at 0.14% or so.

http://siteanalytics.compete.com/altavista.com+duckduckgo.co...

So if that holds true on the percentage then duckduckgo is at about 0.035%. Which is really not bad at all.

Small fry: search.com 2.7%, ask.com 1%, < 1%: naver.com , aol , baidu , yandex , altavista

[il]

Heh, I thought I could find a niche search engine I could advertise on that isn't saturated with competitors but it looks like I'll have to wait for ddg to start accepting ads. Search.com: google Ask.com: google Aol: google altavista: yahoo

naiver, baidu, yandex are local search engines.

It's amazing how much the search market in the US has consolidated. You would think with the declining cost of computing power someone out there would be building their own index.

It's also interesting that cuil doesn't appear in your stats at all.

Free startup idea: Build a niche search engine covering a curated list of sites(like google custom search but with value adds like ddg). Sort of like what blog search engines are doing, but in another area.

[jacquesm]

For ddg to be of any use to you though, you'd have to have sufficient searches in your keywords of interest that it would be worth their while to take your money.

Or you'd have to go overbroad.

Cuil is dead, they've tried to re-invent themselves in april as an encyclopedia, I think they must have missed the memo about WikiPedia's continued success.

Their search results suck too...

Duckduckgo.com is larger than cuil!

[il]

Nope...as long as 1. There is little competition, no quality score, and low click prices and 2. Traffic remains high quality and there is solid fraud detection I could probably monetize a good percentage of searches on ddg with affiliate offers, I wouldn't even need to arbitrage to higher paying ads like AdSense.

If the price is right, almost any search can be monetized.

This is how 2nd tier engines like 7search make money, except they have too much low-quality international and bot traffic to give steady conversions.

ddg could easily monetize and attract lots of advertisers if they published their exact search data, keywords and counts. Wordtracker is making a mint, millions and millions of dollars simply publishing dogpile.com search data, which has a tiny (1%) share of the search market. SEMRush is scraping Google for search data and has over 70,000 customers.

Nobody else currently does this. Privacy concerns aside, if there were a search engine that had a good keyword tool designed for advertisers, it would attract ad money in droves.