They do have their own web crawler. I don't have any idea what percentage of their results come from it, but presumably as they grow their own search results will take an ever-increasing slice of the pie.
There doesn't seem to be any evidence that it's used for indexing at all; it seems more like it's just used to scrape additional info from sites that they index via real search engines like Bing, Yandex, and Yahoo.
Their own crawler is not used for any organic search results, only widget stuff like Instant Answers (and spam detection apparently as per sibling comment).
Why must everything be a "company" killer? There's room in markets for choices. I think DDG is providing a good choice for folks. And having Apple data behind them isn't just potatoes.
1. ...the current idea of superiority is absolute domination on the market (see: monopoly),
2. ...the age we live in promotes being only the BEST and the most AWESOME, without ever giving chance to the average and the mildly-good, which may not shine as brightly but does its job well,
3. ...there's unduly competition on the market – not just your healthy capitalist "We sell better 'cause we make better products, so step aside", but something more antagonistic on a more... personal? level,
or all of it, to some degree.
I could be biased on number three, given that I'm quite sensitive to antagonism in general. It does seem to me that, while there's no malvertisement (no one's saying "My competitors are shit, we're light-years ahead"), everyone seems to try and trump others in spirit.
I recently switched my homepage to be ddg. Most of the time it’s pure annoyance, returning unrelated results and never giving nice top of page summaries. I really didn’t want it to be this way, but most of the time (I’m pretty sure 2/3 at least) i have to revert back to google.
I've been using DDG for a couple of years now, and have a different experience. Usually when I'm frustrated by the the result in DDG, I try the same search in Google, and find that the results are no better!
Google image search and and local results are still better, but DDGs ! system makes it easy to switch search engines when you need to.
To further your point (I have switched a couple years ago, if not more; don't remember), I also found that the new Google layout (with this sort of bubbly cards) is really distracting and I cannot scan the results as fast as before, or as fast as DDG's. UX definitely took a beating with this iteration of Google's results UI.
I think this is a fair point but a major part of my complaint. The other day i tried looking up the hours of a hardware store and kept getting unrelated results. Today i tried to check the hours of a bar, and google returned what i thought were the wrong results, but in fact the bar had just changed its name...things like that are the polish that really makes the difference between one search and a mess of keyword mashing to get the result you’re after.
I have had a similar experience to you. I switched to using DDG as my main search engine for about a year now, and I am quite happy with the results it gives me. Once in a blue moon I'll be stumped enough to try searching Google, but I haven't found that their searches are any better.
Things such as DDG's 'bang' system, and the ability to view and save photos easier, I've been finding it just as usable or even more so than Google these days.
!Bangs are great for when you need to find something specific or technical, which Google is much better at. I find this addresses most of my gripes for personal use.
Do you use Google while logged in? I've heard complaints like that every now and then and I just can't relate. My best guess is that some people get very personalized results and they've grown used to them. I've used DDG as my main search engine for several years now and I don't really have any complaints.
Because, in the current economic environment, there really isn't much room in the markets for choices. It's increasingly been one quasi-monopoly that everyone knows about, and then a bunch of niche options for people who dislike the monopoly player for whatever reason.
Oh? Let's pick an easy market to judge this against, then. I know! Let's talk about smartphones. Surely the largest company on the planet is a quasi-monopoly in this space... oh, but they're not. In fact, Apple's not even a majority leader in just the USA, and the numbers favor them even less globally. There is clearly a choice in the cell phone market between privacy, quality and cost, and people are making those choices.
Not to say that this isn't true right now in the search market. I grew up in a world where Google didn't exist, and the reason Google is so much more popular at search is because they're just that much better at delivering relevant results than everyone else. I used to search with Excite, Yahoo, Lycos, etc. and modernly I've TRIED to use Bing or DDG or whatever other choices have surfaced, but when the product seems free, people are going to make the choice that maximizes quality, and right now Google is just winning at it.
Still, if someone comes along who can actually deliver on the search quality then the market will change.
>Still, if someone comes along who can actually deliver on the search quality then the market will change.
Not really? We've already been here. We had multiple search engines of similar quality. Google came along as a superior product, and therefore raised superior money, and no one else could keep up. It's a zero-sum game in a lot of respects.
Even your smartphone example is zero-sum. Try to buy an Android device that doesn't use a Qualcomm chipset. Unless you go buy an Apple device you're just buying different configurations of the same hardware. Huawei has their own, but they aren't really even allowed to have a considerable market in the US.
The US kills competition. At best in a lot of regards you get two options. Even within the political system. If you don't have money you can't compete.
In 2010, there were quite a few smartphone platforms: iOS, Android, Blackberry, Symbian, WebOS, Windows (CE or Mobile or maybe both; can't remember when the switchover happened), Bada, probably some others I'm forgetting.
Between then and now, the story, aside from slight eddies such as the dismal failures that were Ubuntu Touch and FirefoxOS, has been one of platforms steadily exiting the market. So now we basically have just two options: Android and iOS.
And already I see people on HN occasionally predicting that iOS is doomed due to the fact that it has ~15% global marketshare, and Android has all the rest. I'm not sure if that's really true, but, regardless, the trend is still most certainly not toward a robust, competitive market with lots of consumer choice.
It depends on the market really. In some markets, there are strong effects where anybody but the market leader is at a super strongly disadvantageous position.
In the smartphone market this is not the case. You can buy from various SOC vendors, you can put Android onto your phone, you can do all of this while competing with other companies. There isn't much of an intrinsic benefit that e.g. Samsung has.
For search, it's different. Yes, you can crawl the entire web using crawlers, but what you don't get is data about which links people are clicking. It allows you to order the results in the right way. Google is paying hundreds of millions to Mozilla annually for the hundreds of millions of users that Firefox has. The reason for this is the clicking data. Not that Google needs the Firefox users any more, but any competitor would massively benefit from the amount of searches that they'd get from Firefox users alone.
Or take your classical communications network. Whatsapp, Facebook, etc. Here, network effects are the reason why there is such a strong monopoly. Nobody wants to join a network where they can't talk to anybody. So people join the popular ones like Whatsapp or Facebook.
There is a ton of money to make if you are in a monopoly position where you can't be kicked out and that's what most of the SV stories are about. They get VC to be able to get big enough to disrupt some market and become monopolist, hoping to stay monopolist due to network effects or similar mechanisms.
DDG is my default search. It's good for 85% of my searches. Its video and maps search clearly lag behind Google (mostly from a UI standpoint). It needs to find a better balance between shepherding privacy and UX. Most local search is weak, even if I enter in my city/state.
Once place they are long ahead on UI is the image search.
You can actually "view file" and not "view site" as google had to do after that lawsuit from getty [1]
But having said that, it is very annoying that they put a large nagging notification on the top right of the screen asking to switch to it as it's default.
If I want to do that I will do it myself thank you. I never figured out why webpages do this kind of thing (i.e. pop up a newsletter subscription form blocking the whole article). It just pisses off the users. It's actually the main reason DDG is not my default search engine.
I started using DDG as my default search engine about 6 months ago, and for 95% of the searches I do it's totally fine.
I don't know why people think that DDG needs to "stop" Google; did people think that Lycos and Infoseek and Yahoo couldn't coexist back in the 90's? I think it's good that both companies have some competition from each other.
history has mostly shown a zero-sum game when it comes to search. Didn’t all of those other search engines you listed die off? Even Bing has been mostly irrelevant in comparison to Google. Also a lot of DDG users came over because they were unhappy with some of Google’s practices. Therefore it’s natural for them to want to justify their decision as a good choice by hoping the rest of the world comes to the same conclusion.
I tried DDG, it worked good but Google is better. I can’t afford to spend cycles wondering what Google would have returned when I’m trying to research something while I code.
Oh, I'm not disputing that the world tends to converge on a brands, but I'm trying to say that that doesn't have to be the case; both Coke and Pepsi can coexist, as can Lysol and Clorox. When I eat at McDonalds, I never have the mentality of "by eating here, I'm stopping Burger King".
At this point I've found DDG to be comparable to Google, but occasionally I have to do the !g to find what I'm looking for.
With fast food or soft drink brands, the differences are minor taste based things and quite frankly one or the other doesn't matter much. It's easy to compare at different times and decide on your own tastes and efficiency factors. The problem is with search engines, quality of results makes a big difference in how your time is spent and it's trivial to check what the competition has on offer - almost every time I would run a query on DDG I would find myself going "huh, I wonder if Google would have done better".
You don't go "wow, that burger sucked, I'll go get the competitors now", you're already satiated enough with your crappy burger. Because it's easy and cheap to run a query, you're almost forced to check.
Given how much better Google often does, running my queries on DDG in the first place is generally a waste of my time.
> history has mostly shown a zero-sum game when it comes to search. Didn’t all of those other search engines you listed die off? Even Bing has been mostly irrelevant in comparison to Google. Also a lot of DDG users came over because they were unhappy with some of Google’s practices. Therefore it’s natural for them to want to justify their decision as a good choice by hoping the rest of the world comes to the same conclusion.
What does that imply about sustainability of free market capitalism?
After all, all market benefits and dynamics die off if people on the market are unable to exercise choice.
95% is typically fine for me; I typically do the !g or !s thing when I don't get an answer quick enough. It is pretty rare that I don't find an answer after that.
I've used DDG for about four years but not really to do DDG searches. I use its "!" prefixes so that I can do something similar to chrome's omnibox search with different engines in other browsers without thinking about it. Its muscle memory now for me to !g, !w, or !a whenever I need to search a specific site for something.
I've heard that a few times on DDG-related articles this past week but I was under the impression that the duck had its own crawlers and used Bing on top of that to complete its results. Do they really solely proxy Bing results?
Mostly Bing for any non trivial query. As far as I see, they never give actual numbers / breakdown and try hard to divert attention from this. If they do i would love to know.
Without the personal information being recorded and sold.
Kind of goes to show that the personal information we are giving away may not be that important when it comes to finding what we need, even as it makes us a bigger and juicier target for ads.
My guess, <1%. I would be happy to be refuted with real data. Creating and maintaining a global scale high quality search engine requires a huge team with billion dollar level resources. They have neither, for now.
If you want to know how much of a real, self-sufficient search engine it is, just look at the hardware footprint. You need a lot of computing and storage just for the crawling and indexing (webspam included), let alone the serving.
Apparently they only use this data for simple question and answer queries, because they do not disclose breakdown of query types i can not certainly know the numbers, and i made an optimistic guess. Also i don't think my points regarding building a real search engine were unfair. Do you disagree with any of these? I express cynicism because of lack on transparency on their side.
Even though a lot of the indexing data is from Bing, doesn't DDG do extra stuff to guarantee privacy?
I don't particularly care who is giving me the data as long as the results tend to be OK; I don't run any MS crap at home but if their search service tends to work alright, then power to them.
Sure, but in my eyes this makes them a proxy, not a search engine.It is nice to have alternatives, but it looks at the moment they are at the mercy of Bing. Maybe one day they will evolve and become an actual search engine. who knows.
And what's your point, exactly? You aren't tracked by Bing because they are proxying. DDG gets ad revenue (who cares that they are Bing ads?) which pays for this service. If the results are good, what do you care?
Sure, I don't want to use bing behind a proxy, a lot of people here is acting as if it is something else. They are acting as if it is something else. You like it? Use it.
I don't know your intent but the link basically confirms that it's all Bing and Oath.
> We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we also source from a variety of partners, including Oath (formerly Yahoo) and Bing.
But... it's... just Bing with federated search redirectors? Is that truly competitive? Any of the search companies could implement the same overnight if users were clamoring for it.
Just curious, what would you say the majority of your searches are category wise? Do you use it for a lot of local searches (finding restaurants) or more for tech/programming?
Seems like everyone’s has a different experience with DDG. But it’s sounds like it’s better in some categories than other stuff.
id imagine speed isn't a current priority for Google as Gmail, calendar and maps have shown. It's probably a hold over from before, I'd give it a year before they roll out some improvement that allows it down.
This couldn't be farther from the truth. More speed means more page views means more ads seen means more revenue. Walmart Amazon plus others have done studies showing faster load times translates directly into increased revenue in there retail.
Or your were lucky enough to start using Gmail with your own domain, when Google Apps was still free for up to 10 users, and can still use it for free.
Google Apps with a custom domain was once free for as many email accounts as you were approved for. There are a handful out there with lots more than 10 free accounts. They don’t get support, have less space provided, and can’t use the outlook connector so it’s not an equal comparison. It’s nice that google hasn’t changed this on their users.
Zoho recently restricted their free custom domain service for email. Not sure who is the best free option out there now.
I have my own domain name through Google apps and use a naive mail client to access gmail. As soon as the handful of people I talk to exclusively on hangouts migrate elsewhere, I'm ditching Google as a back-end. I'd never have predicted this in 2008. Back then Google still cared about UI speed.
As long as DDG is not traded publicly it will do just fine. Investors would inevitably be screaming for more growth and ultimately force them to comprise their current values.
again, Weinberg, the founder of DDG, has been exploiting HN and all major internet communities to promote his product. Most of what you see as unplanned posts and discussions about DDG really aren't
Quick question, if you Google 'ddg' in incognito mode, do you get any results regarding DuckDuckGo?
In the first 10 pages of Google Search I only get two 'relevant' results; one in the bottom of the first page, and a second one of an article mentioning DuckDuckGo in page 8 or something. (Not trying to start a war here, just asking).
Android smartphone, Chrome isn't my default browser but I used Chrome (it's set to Google default, mostly for local search & YouTube). "ddg" doesn't return duckduckgo until page 4, but typing "duck" returns duckduckgo as suggested result 4, and searching "duck" returns duckduckgo on the first page.
I get a link to DuckDuckGo on page 3, and a mention of it on page 8.
On page 2 there is a link to "Duck Duck Geese" which is a local restaurant apparently.
Google's official reason for forcing local search results was that 1 in 5 users were searching for local results. So in this case they are returning results that are sub-optimal to 4 out of 5 users.
Google is at it's core an ad company, not a search company. So they have backed off crawling the entire internet and only crawl what has a business return for them. Combine that with carefully curating the results they publish, it can barely even be called a search engine at this point. I get more relevant results from DDG at this point.
Google doesn't need to be stopped, a lot of innovation is happening there. It just has to be more profitable to care about the users of the services than about the business-clients of Google. If privacy of end users would be a core business instead of selling data there would be no problem. Sadly I don't have any glimpse of an idea how that could be happening. The world is complicated and every little piece that makes interacting with the world more convenient is welcome. Google is convenient, so nobody[1] gives a damn about their data.
I use DDG for 90% of my searches, no complaints from my side.
[1] some do, but since many people Diabetes 2 can't be convinced for a more healthy life style, what do you really expect from others if consequences of habits are not even directly visible...
I use DDG primarily now. I've noticed that I often get better results for my programming queries than from Google and there's always `!g` if I don't find what I'm looking for.
On a side note: anyone else think Apple will eventually buy DDG?
Google will have its comeuppance one day too. It may not look like that right now, but back in the day Sears, too, had everything, and look at them today.
Not a very good comparison I'm afraid, Sears didn't lose to an other company who was offering the same service, they lost to a series of companies that offered the same utility but in a very different way.
DDG is mostly just offering the same service as Google (really, only a fraction of the service because Google is a lot more than Search these days). As such I expect that at this point if a Google-killer appears it's also be a DDG killer as collateral damage.
is he making that comparison? i read it as, ddg may not bring down google, but something eventually will, which seems exactly what you are saying too...
It's clickbait hyperbole to say nothing can stop google. Google will fall once something usurps their dominant platform advantage ( chrome/search/android ).
People said the same thing about Microsoft/IE when microsoft leveraged their dominant OS position to take over the browser market. But once google search became just as important or even more important than the Windows itself, they leveraged their search platform to take over the browser market with chrome.
For now, google is cleverly leveraging it's search/android/chrome platforms to block competition and maintain it's dominant position. But eventually, another product/platform will arise that will knock google off its pedestal. Maybe even anti-trust lawsuits will help like it did with ending the Windows-IE monopoly.
Please tell me how to use a smartphone without being locked in the Apple platform or Google's. I'm well aware of LineageOS (and other ROM) and of F-Droid (and Yalp and others) but in reality, it's impossible not to supply Google with vast amount of personal data.
So for now, it's true that "nothing can stop google". Unless we change the situation (e.g legal/political actions), this won't change. But of course, if we collectively admit nothing can stop Google now, then we'll do something that makes it possible to stop Google and have some real competitors.
I'm going to focus mostly on their SE. Google's success is hugely based off their years and years of data collection, meaning no company starting now will ever catch up. I understand that history has shown how unlikely it is for a company to truly be unmatched, but when huge sample sizes of data that can only be accrued with time and no other means comes into play, the situation is different.
This issue of time is made even worse knowing that Google's engine would be a pain to try and recreate, given their decades of optimization. If you're someone who A) wants to match google's data and B) catch up to the competency of their search engine, you're looking at 20+ years of work all while google continues to improve their current search engine. Many PhD's have gone into ensuring Google's SE is perfect down to every last decimal point. It would actually be impossible to make an exact copy without direct theft.
"Google will fall once something usurps their dominant platform advantage ( chrome/search/android )."
I question whether this is a matter of "when" or whether it's actually a big "if". People will be able to provide alternatives to google but i don't think there will ever be another google.
As has been mentioned probably millions of times in the last decade, "to google" is synonymous with, "to search the internet for". As long as this remains true, and google search remains free, their monopoly position cannot be challenged. they have the trademark on the shortest sequence of syllables which means "to search the internet for" which means that in the vast majority of cases, when people describe searching the internet for something, they will do so with the word "google".
No, because Kodak is not a free service. Xerox or Kleenex are closer, obviously, but neither of them is free to use, so there's always room to come along with something cheaper, moreover, Xerox and Kleenex at least have unbranded, one word synonyms for the commodity they produce, photocopy and tissue respectively. Google has "search the internet for", which you will never convince the average person to say, so dethroning google in "search" is at least as difficult as getting the word for "to google" changed.
Furthermore, no one can compete with Google on price, since it's free, and it's very unlikely that anyone will be able to compete on quality, unless they start disallowing adblock somehow.
The best you can hope for as a competitor is to carve out a niche of conscientious objectors, and google doesn't really care about those people either, because they are intrinsically difficult to monetize.
> Furthermore, no one can compete with Google on price, since it's free
Google is free because they are deriving revenue from ads. Another service monetizing with ads or by some other method not directly from users could share revenue with users, thus competing favorably on price with Google's free service.
I'm not entirely sure "Kodak moment" was ever more than advertising, but do people still use that phrase? I know it, as a thirty-something, but I'm not sure I've ever used it.
Because Google Search sucks these days. (To be fair, this is not by any fault of Google themselves. Rather, like any monoculture, Google Search is especially vulnerable to external attacks, such as from SEO's trying to game the system.) If anything, DDG today is a lot closer to the quality Google Search itself used to provide back in the 2000s, before it was SEO-gamed to death.
I mostly agree with you about Google search results, however I think the decreasing quality is more due to political influence and corruption, rather than SEO-games.
I use DDG as my main search engine. Though sometimes frustrated with the results that it pulls, then I go to Google. I'm sure DDG can only improve, I will continue to use them.
Google's search engine provides good results for precisely the reason DDG will never be able to: They sacrifice privacy to collect data that improves search results.
251 comments
[ 5.0 ms ] story [ 256 ms ] threadhttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4851680
I wonder if it's the fact that...
1. ...the current idea of superiority is absolute domination on the market (see: monopoly),
2. ...the age we live in promotes being only the BEST and the most AWESOME, without ever giving chance to the average and the mildly-good, which may not shine as brightly but does its job well,
3. ...there's unduly competition on the market – not just your healthy capitalist "We sell better 'cause we make better products, so step aside", but something more antagonistic on a more... personal? level,
or all of it, to some degree.
I could be biased on number three, given that I'm quite sensitive to antagonism in general. It does seem to me that, while there's no malvertisement (no one's saying "My competitors are shit, we're light-years ahead"), everyone seems to try and trump others in spirit.
Nah, probably not.
Google image search and and local results are still better, but DDGs ! system makes it easy to switch search engines when you need to.
Things such as DDG's 'bang' system, and the ability to view and save photos easier, I've been finding it just as usable or even more so than Google these days.
Not to say that this isn't true right now in the search market. I grew up in a world where Google didn't exist, and the reason Google is so much more popular at search is because they're just that much better at delivering relevant results than everyone else. I used to search with Excite, Yahoo, Lycos, etc. and modernly I've TRIED to use Bing or DDG or whatever other choices have surfaced, but when the product seems free, people are going to make the choice that maximizes quality, and right now Google is just winning at it.
Still, if someone comes along who can actually deliver on the search quality then the market will change.
Not really? We've already been here. We had multiple search engines of similar quality. Google came along as a superior product, and therefore raised superior money, and no one else could keep up. It's a zero-sum game in a lot of respects.
Even your smartphone example is zero-sum. Try to buy an Android device that doesn't use a Qualcomm chipset. Unless you go buy an Apple device you're just buying different configurations of the same hardware. Huawei has their own, but they aren't really even allowed to have a considerable market in the US.
The US kills competition. At best in a lot of regards you get two options. Even within the political system. If you don't have money you can't compete.
In 2010, there were quite a few smartphone platforms: iOS, Android, Blackberry, Symbian, WebOS, Windows (CE or Mobile or maybe both; can't remember when the switchover happened), Bada, probably some others I'm forgetting.
Between then and now, the story, aside from slight eddies such as the dismal failures that were Ubuntu Touch and FirefoxOS, has been one of platforms steadily exiting the market. So now we basically have just two options: Android and iOS.
And already I see people on HN occasionally predicting that iOS is doomed due to the fact that it has ~15% global marketshare, and Android has all the rest. I'm not sure if that's really true, but, regardless, the trend is still most certainly not toward a robust, competitive market with lots of consumer choice.
In the smartphone market this is not the case. You can buy from various SOC vendors, you can put Android onto your phone, you can do all of this while competing with other companies. There isn't much of an intrinsic benefit that e.g. Samsung has.
For search, it's different. Yes, you can crawl the entire web using crawlers, but what you don't get is data about which links people are clicking. It allows you to order the results in the right way. Google is paying hundreds of millions to Mozilla annually for the hundreds of millions of users that Firefox has. The reason for this is the clicking data. Not that Google needs the Firefox users any more, but any competitor would massively benefit from the amount of searches that they'd get from Firefox users alone.
Or take your classical communications network. Whatsapp, Facebook, etc. Here, network effects are the reason why there is such a strong monopoly. Nobody wants to join a network where they can't talk to anybody. So people join the popular ones like Whatsapp or Facebook.
There is a ton of money to make if you are in a monopoly position where you can't be kicked out and that's what most of the SV stories are about. They get VC to be able to get big enough to disrupt some market and become monopolist, hoping to stay monopolist due to network effects or similar mechanisms.
But having said that, it is very annoying that they put a large nagging notification on the top right of the screen asking to switch to it as it's default.
If I want to do that I will do it myself thank you. I never figured out why webpages do this kind of thing (i.e. pop up a newsletter subscription form blocking the whole article). It just pisses off the users. It's actually the main reason DDG is not my default search engine.
[1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/02/internet-rages-after...
I don't know why people think that DDG needs to "stop" Google; did people think that Lycos and Infoseek and Yahoo couldn't coexist back in the 90's? I think it's good that both companies have some competition from each other.
I tried DDG, it worked good but Google is better. I can’t afford to spend cycles wondering what Google would have returned when I’m trying to research something while I code.
https://duckduckgo.com/bang
At this point I've found DDG to be comparable to Google, but occasionally I have to do the !g to find what I'm looking for.
You don't go "wow, that burger sucked, I'll go get the competitors now", you're already satiated enough with your crappy burger. Because it's easy and cheap to run a query, you're almost forced to check.
Given how much better Google often does, running my queries on DDG in the first place is generally a waste of my time.
What does that imply about sustainability of free market capitalism?
After all, all market benefits and dynamics die off if people on the market are unable to exercise choice.
DDG is much better for searches that I don't want personalized results for.
There is nothing stopping you from falling back to google that 5% of the time.
https://duck.co/help/results/sources
Kind of goes to show that the personal information we are giving away may not be that important when it comes to finding what we need, even as it makes us a bigger and juicier target for ads.
If your goal is to convince others, you should collect the data yourself and share it with them.
I don't particularly care who is giving me the data as long as the results tend to be OK; I don't run any MS crap at home but if their search service tends to work alright, then power to them.
> We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we also source from a variety of partners, including Oath (formerly Yahoo) and Bing.
Seems like everyone’s has a different experience with DDG. But it’s sounds like it’s better in some categories than other stuff.
The bangs feature is really useful to me personally since it supports so many sites.
https://duckduckgo.com/bang
My only complaint is that it's noticeably slower than Google
On the other hand if I don't like Supermarket-X, I can go to Supermarket-Y
Zoho recently restricted their free custom domain service for email. Not sure who is the best free option out there now.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
On page 2 there is a link to "Duck Duck Geese" which is a local restaurant apparently.
Google's official reason for forcing local search results was that 1 in 5 users were searching for local results. So in this case they are returning results that are sub-optimal to 4 out of 5 users.
What's the difference between Google's web crawler and DuckDuckGo's web crawler?
> Combine that with carefully curating the results they publish,
Google carefully curates? I thought that Google's search results is based on the users behavior? Are they carefully manipulating everyone's results?
100%
I use DDG for 90% of my searches, no complaints from my side.
[1] some do, but since many people Diabetes 2 can't be convinced for a more healthy life style, what do you really expect from others if consequences of habits are not even directly visible...
On a side note: anyone else think Apple will eventually buy DDG?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18816748
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18913336
and I'm an Apple user
Google will have its comeuppance one day too. It may not look like that right now, but back in the day Sears, too, had everything, and look at them today.
DDG is mostly just offering the same service as Google (really, only a fraction of the service because Google is a lot more than Search these days). As such I expect that at this point if a Google-killer appears it's also be a DDG killer as collateral damage.
Ad supported services are fine, targeted ads that require ever more invasive spying on your users on behalf of your advertising customers are not.
People said the same thing about Microsoft/IE when microsoft leveraged their dominant OS position to take over the browser market. But once google search became just as important or even more important than the Windows itself, they leveraged their search platform to take over the browser market with chrome.
For now, google is cleverly leveraging it's search/android/chrome platforms to block competition and maintain it's dominant position. But eventually, another product/platform will arise that will knock google off its pedestal. Maybe even anti-trust lawsuits will help like it did with ending the Windows-IE monopoly.
So for now, it's true that "nothing can stop google". Unless we change the situation (e.g legal/political actions), this won't change. But of course, if we collectively admit nothing can stop Google now, then we'll do something that makes it possible to stop Google and have some real competitors.
This issue of time is made even worse knowing that Google's engine would be a pain to try and recreate, given their decades of optimization. If you're someone who A) wants to match google's data and B) catch up to the competency of their search engine, you're looking at 20+ years of work all while google continues to improve their current search engine. Many PhD's have gone into ensuring Google's SE is perfect down to every last decimal point. It would actually be impossible to make an exact copy without direct theft.
"Google will fall once something usurps their dominant platform advantage ( chrome/search/android )."
I question whether this is a matter of "when" or whether it's actually a big "if". People will be able to provide alternatives to google but i don't think there will ever be another google.
Hmm, doesn't quite roll of the tongue, does it? Not the same thing.
Furthermore, no one can compete with Google on price, since it's free, and it's very unlikely that anyone will be able to compete on quality, unless they start disallowing adblock somehow.
The best you can hope for as a competitor is to carve out a niche of conscientious objectors, and google doesn't really care about those people either, because they are intrinsically difficult to monetize.
Google is free because they are deriving revenue from ads. Another service monetizing with ads or by some other method not directly from users could share revenue with users, thus competing favorably on price with Google's free service.
Porn brings massive traffic, then they'll use the site for other things.
https://www.geekwire.com/2019/investigation-reveals-microsof... Investigation reveals that Microsoft Bing surfaces and recommends ...