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by anonymous_tip 1486 days ago
DuckDuckGo CEO put a response on r/technology: https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/uxiah9/duckduck.... In it he claims there aren't viable alternatives.

Here's a quote from the relevant part: "While a lot of what you see on our results page privately incorporates content from other sources, including our own indexes (e.g., Wikipedia, Local listings, Sports, etc.), we source most of our traditional links and images privately from Bing (though because of other search technology our link and image results still may look different). Really only two companies (Google and Microsoft) have a high-quality global web link index (because I believe it costs upwards of a billion dollars a year to do), and so literally every other global search engine needs to bootstrap with one or both of them to provide a mainstream search product. The same is true for maps btw -- only the biggest companies can similarly afford to put satellites up and send ground cars to take streetview pictures of every neighborhood."
2 comments
mrgalaxy 1486 days ago
While I appreciate this response from the CEO, I still think that he and DDG lack creativity. Again it is not about actually replacing Bing but having leverage on Microsoft. DDG pays Microsoft a whole lot of money I imagine for that search, so it shouldn’t take much for them keep their promises on privacy.

In fact the way I read this, I just see someone who is essentially saying they’d rather have good search results if it means sacrificing privacy.

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GekkePrutser 1486 days ago
> In fact the way I read this, I just see someone who is essentially saying they’d rather have good search results if it means sacrificing privacy.

Which would be ok for most CEOs but not for the one from DDG where the only raison d'etre is privacy :)

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anonymous_tip 1486 days ago
What makes you think they can get significant leverage on MS, a company that is literally on the order of 1,000 times bigger (Wikipedia says DDG has about 150 employees, to MS's 182,000 and market cap of 2 trillion!).
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ColinHayhurst 1486 days ago
> because I believe it costs upwards of a billion dollars a year to do

We have a 5+ billion webpage search index and API. $billions? We don't think so.

> literally every other global search engine needs to bootstrap with one or both of them

I guess we are the exception; we provide no-tracking search to users globally. We have an API with less constraints than Google or Bing.

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