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Papas Fritas writes:
"There's an interesting read today by John Paul Titlow at FastCoLabs about DuckDuckGo, a search engine launched in 2008 that is now doing 4 million search queries per day and growing 200-500% annually. DuckDuckGo's secret weapon is hardcore privacy. When you do a search from DuckDuckGo's website or one of its mobile apps, it doesn't know who you are. There are no user accounts. Your IP address isn't logged by default. The site doesn't use search cookies to keep track of what you do over time or where else you go online.
'If you look at the logs of people's search sessions, they're the most personal thing on the Internet,' says founder Gabriel Weinberg. 'Unlike Facebook, where you choose what to post, with search you're typing in medical and financial problems and all sorts of other things. You're not thinking about the privacy implications of your search history.' DuckDuckGo's no-holds-barred approach to privacy gives the search engine a unique selling point as Google gobbles up more private user data. 'It was extreme at the time,' says Weinberg. 'And it still may be considered extreme by some people, but I think it's becoming less extreme nowadays. In the last year, it's become obvious why people don't want to be tracked.'"
(Score: 5, Insightful) by maxwell demon on Thursday February 20 2014, @11:48PM
I can't see anything in that quote where the money comes from. You know, many people using your service for free doesn't magically make you money.
It says they have a small number of contractors. Do those contractors pay them? And if so, what do they get in return?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Fluffeh on Thursday February 20 2014, @11:59PM
The Wikipedia article states that the revenue is from advertising.
If you perform a search on the site, you will see simple sponsored links at the top of the results. No adwords, no sneaky embedded "paid" search results, just a result in a yellow/orange highlight with the words "Sponsored Link" at the bottom right.
Enough visitors and that's a simple way to make money covering costs.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by hemocyanin on Friday February 21 2014, @05:37AM
There was an article with the founder. DDG makes money by displaying targeted ads. They use the search query to do the targeting. He explained that knowing the search query is 95% of the equation. Obviously, they'll know that because the user typed it in. So they make money the same way google does, by serving ads, except instead of trying to compile a dossier on you like google, they take the straight forward approach of assuming that if you are searching for something, you are interested in it.
Now, how can you tell if their servers are running their software? You can't. But what advantage is there to not? If they get busted one time, their business is dead forever and all the work that went into it evaporates. I do have some faith in enlightened self-interest.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 21 2014, @07:13AM
That's all true but all it takes is one "National Security Letter" or similar.
I don't really care that much about the NSA et all spying on my searches. To me the real problem is that Google's searches have gone down in quality. It seems like I have to switch to "verbatim" mode for almost everything (or I get "joe sixpack" results without the search terms I'm looking for) but switching to "verbatim" sometimes seems to not rank the pages as usefully.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Caballo Negro on Friday February 21 2014, @08:12AM
They also ask you politely to whitelist their site if they spot you using an ad blocker. I've complied.
(Score: 1) by mister_playboy on Friday February 21 2014, @11:45AM
Indeed... that is the one and only whitelisting I've ever made in ABP after having used it for about 6 years!
(Score: 5, Informative) by TheRaven on Friday February 21 2014, @08:55AM
They do a few other things too. For example, if you type !amazon in your search terms, then you get the result of your search on the Amazon site, but via the referrer link. This means that they get some percentage of anything you buy. I usually just type things I'm looking to buy into the search box and then add !amazon if I don't find it in a quick search of the web.
Those commands are really useful. The !freebsd tag will search FreeBSD man pages, !devapple will search the Apple developer database, and so on. I find it really useful to have a single search box that can redirect me to all of the site-specific searches that I use easily. Most of the ones I use don't provide referrer kick-backs, but some do, and I'm very happy for DDG to get the money.
I switched to using them around 2008 when Google decided to hijack the up and down arrow keys in the search box. On OS X, up-arrow in any text field means jump to the start, and having to relearn muscle memory for a single Google text box was a UI decision that killed the utility of the site for me. At the time, DDG also did the infinite-scrolling thing (no other search engines did, although they all added it soon after) and had a much cleaner UI. I exchanged a few emails with Gabriel over usability issues that were present and he set up a test site for me to complain about and then fixed all of the issues and rolled out that version on the main site. Amazing service and not something I'd see from any of the big search companies (and I know quite a few people who work at Google and Yahoo! personally...).
I still find their zero-click information very useful. Gabriel has actually been very clever there, avoiding the need for complex natural language processing by making it easy for users to explicitly disambiguate what they really mean.
sudo mod me up
(Score: 1) by hubie on Friday February 21 2014, @03:25PM
Of course, that isn't always the case [youtube.com]. :)
(Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Friday February 21 2014, @03:44PM
The best part of that video:
Mr. Internet on a Segway towing a trailer of cats.
(Score: 1) by hubie on Friday February 21 2014, @04:23PM
With his latte and bluetooth earpiece. :)