[zone411]

I'm sorry but I have big problems with calling DDG a real search engine. Their page states "DuckDuckGo is a search engine like Google." BS. It's a meta search engine that relies on other real search engines, such as Bing, to get the results. If ever becomes a threat to Bing, they'll cut them off in a second. DDG doesn't do the hard and resource-intensive work of crawling and ranking the pages, they just tweak the results of others in ways that gets them publicity on tech blogs.

[epi0Bauqu]

For the record, I've been crawling the Web since the beginning of DDG (and before the BOSS or the Bing APIs existed). Yes, a one FTE, self-funded search engine, does not have the capacity to spend millions of dollars on crawling (does Google spend billions?).

I now focus my crawling efforts where I see they can add significant value, namely on spam removal and zero-click info. Our index actually shows the top result about half the time, which is not from any external API. Given that most people click the top result most of the time, this is not an insignificant addition.

We of course use external sources, but I think your comment is too dismissive of the intelligence we've woven on top and through them. I'm not interested in sharing all of DDG's trade secrets just to prove a point, but needless to say, you can simply compare the external APIs to our results across a swath of different types of queries and see the differences.

Finally, I find the premise of your comment a bit short-sighted, but I'm actually OK with being dismissed as a toy. In the eyes of the average user, they don't care where results came from at all. They just want the right information faster. So quite frankly, I think it is a reasonable move to use external APIs and focus on things like the top result, UI, etc. More recently, Yahoo and Ask seem to agree. Most people are dismissive of them too, but they've been doing a lot of innovative UI things, which matter a lot to end users.

[petervandijck]

Being dismissed as a "toy" is probably the best thing that could happen to DDG right now, and for the foreseeable future. They're searching for an angle against Google, a way in. They may well find one (although it's a tough battle).

[greenyoda]

I don't really care whether they're a "real search engine" or not. In my experience, they give better results than Google (less spammy content-farm stuff), and they disclose less of my personal information, so I use them instead of Google.

[babeKnuth]

amen brother.

[brianobush]

DDG is a meta search engine now, but this is a step towards being a real search engine someday. Harvesting queries, click through analysis, etc is vital to the development of a real SE. I would call this method SE boot-strapping.