I actually have a lot of faith in Google to do the right thing for their users. After all they mostly walked away, or at least severely hampered their business in China. They will be more than willing to walk away from sites their users think are low quality.
I'm not saying that this means they will do the exact same thing DDG did. I'm just saying any decisions they make will be primarily based on looking out for their users best interest rather than short term adsense revenue.
what about your statement is supported by their actual actions in the recent years? who are their actual customers, searchers or adwords bidders? They simply need to provide a decent enough search experience to keep users coming back so they can keep adwords bidders participating. It's their entire business model.
- Adding affiliate codes to the search results: https://duckduckgo.com/privacy.html The relevant part is "we may add an affiliate code to some eCommerce sites (e.g. Amazon & eBay)". It looks like this is where most of the revenue comes from, according to http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2011/01/26/can-a-start-u... . Relevant part is "The site is self-funded and saw about $15,000 in revenue last year, mostly through Amazon’s affiliate program, which pays whenever a customer buys an Amazon product after clicking on a DuckDuckGo link."
Wow, Matt, I'm not sure if I should be flattered or scared that you're paying this close attention to DuckDuckGo :).
The $15,000 is less than my graduate school stipend was. Needless to say, we're not raking in the dough here.
I just added this to the FAQ, i.e. how do you make money (I don't see any ads)? We'd like to show minimal advertising and make the venture more sustainable, for sure, but haven't been able to find a good ad provider willing to work within the DDG privacy principles.
he's apparently used duckduckgo. i can recognize it from a mile away because the stalking/wow factor that all us users experience after using it seems to have also bit him. :)
Wouldn't this mean DDG is giving amazon information about it's users?
I love DDG, but this seems shady putting the affiliate code into search results. Amazon ranks great, but it seems this would encourage DDG to rank Amazon even higher. Google would get in quite a bit of trouble for doing this.
No, we're not giving any more information than would otherwise flow by clicking on a link in the SERPs. And actually, we're giving less information than if you would click on the same result in Google because we're not sending your search terms via the referrer header. We've stayed away from things like commission junction because then you would be giving away information as it is routed through a third-party. For more info, see the privacy policy: http://duckduckgo.com/privacy.html. In the other direction, Amazon doesn't share any personal info.
No, but you're implying that DDG either has no plans to make money (which is possible, if rather a short-lived plan) or will remain small enough to be reliant entirely on Gabriel's day job.
DDG is a search engine that's using its search to make money. Just like Google.
I'm not saying that this means they will do the exact same thing DDG did. I'm just saying any decisions they make will be primarily based on looking out for their users best interest rather than short term adsense revenue.