
What is the business model for DuckDuckGo? (2017) - asamant
https://spreadprivacy.com/duckduckgo-revenue-model/
======
wegs
DuckDuckGo has 50-100 employees, according to CrunchBase, while Google has
over 100,000 employees. The exact numbers are irrelevant, but Google has
around three orders of magnitude more employees than DDG.

a) DDG needs about 1/1000th the revenue of Google to survive at its current
scale.

b) Software quality does not scale linearly with manpower. A 50-100 person
team can do /almost/ as well as a 10,000 person team in the same domain. You
spend a lot to go from 90% to 99% or 99% to 99.9%.

c) Unsurprisingly, I find DDG's search results good enough. I rarely go to
Google, and only when DDG fails me.

d) If DDG can't target advertising as well as Google, they'll still have
enough revenue to survive at their current level of quality. Their CPM is
likely lower than Google's with less data and optimization, but I'd guess at
worst 2x lower, not 1000x lower.

I'm glad they're doing well. On paper, it seems like a sound business model,
and it's a heck of a lot more customer-friendly.

Curiously, I'd say 90% of the time I use Google is for math. If I'm typing a
complex math expression (especially with units), Google tends to do much
better than DDG.

~~~
baryphonic
When I switched to DDG, I was happier with it than with Google. To me, DDG
feels like Google felt ten years ago, before it was infested with "AI." Today,
Google search results look more like the invasive shopping mall ads in
Minority Report, tailored to what it thinks I'll click on, rather than
relevant results based on my query. I only rarely (~once a month) have to use
Google search to find something that DDG just cannot, and usually this is some
highly technical topic. (I did it yesterday because I couldn't find
information about a strange, fatal regex error in Firefox - seriously, one
regex that Firefox can't understand prevents script execution, even when
wrapped in exception handlers.)

I think Google has hit some sort of inflection point where their further
attempts to improve search have made it a less useful experience and are
mainly in service of their dual corporate mandate to put al ads in front of
all eyeballs and control all access to all information.

~~~
lostlogin
> When I switched to DDG, I was happier with it than with Google.

I regularly do !g, but I think the thing that is reducing that fastest is the
declining quality of Google results. If I search for ‘x, y and z’, I then see
a load of results with small text underneath saying ‘include z?’. It drives me
demented, why wouldn’t I want to include my search terms?

~~~
JTon
> It drives me demented, why wouldn’t I want to include my search terms?

Well, I think the answer to your question is Google is trying to be friendly
to the layman. It's not hard to think of examples where the user inputs a
something into the search box that a CS major knows will not result in the
implied wants of the user. Google tries to do a lot of human to machine
translation work, and I think you're seeing the result of it. That being said,
you can use quotations to explicitly include terms.

~~~
finiteloops
This works for the masses, but in my experience when machines force a use
case, it causes more headache than not cause I'm not like the masses.

A barely related side rant: my microwave decided it wants to error out when it
thinks you're trying to microwave air. i have a bowl in there. stop telling me
to open the door to put something in. Whatever engineer at GE thought they
would be smarter than the user, you're one of the many reasons your company is
going out of business.

~~~
TuringTest
I think that it's O.K. when a user interface which issues a warning when it
detects a dangerous condition.

The problem is when the warning is a "stop" and it doesn't have an override "I
know what I'm doing".

------
joe_fishfish
I like DuckDuckGo, but it's much worse than Google at localisation. It's
annoying to have to search, then repeat the search with "UK" on the end to
make it realise I'm not interested in buying e.g. building supplies or coffee
or beer from US-based businesses.

I get that it has no concept of who I am when I search, but some kind of
localisation based on IP address could maybe help?

Also, it feels a little disingenuous to say Google is not a search company,
it's an advertising company. DDG's revenue is also built on ads. Is it fair to
say they are also not an advertising company, not a search company?

~~~
mikorym
There is a slider that allows you to put it on or off.

If your IP is in the UK, the slider will say "United Kingdom on/off" or
something like that.

~~~
magicalhippo
Right, but it's kinda annoying having to turn it on and off, as it remembers
and I keep forgetting what I used last.

If I'm searching for programming stuff or similar, I want it off. If I'm
searching for shops that sells bricks for my new wall, I want local results.

I've also noticed that even with it on, the "local" indexing is distinctly
significantly worse than Google. That is, Google is much, much better at
finding relevant pages which may contain variations on my search term when
using my native language.

I guess that's just a question of resources, which is fair enough.

~~~
worble
> If I'm searching for programming stuff or similar, I want it off. If I'm
> searching for shops that sells bricks for my new wall, I want local results.

In all fairness, how exactly do you expect DDG to know what you want from
this, without doing some sketchy privacy invasive scanning of your search? If
you really want a company to scan your every search and then tailor the
results specifically, then by all means use Google, that's what they're good
at!

~~~
wolfgang42
_> how exactly do you expect DDG to know what you want from this_

The obvious heuristic is “does this search term frequently appear on local
result sites?” For example, “brick suppliers” is a search term associated with
websites that have a business address, whereas “python string length” mostly
isn’t. The search engine already has to scan your search to know what to send
you from the index; it doesn’t require anything more than that to be able to
guess at the intent of specific searches.

------
bambax
I dislike Google as a company but their search results are orders of magnitude
better than the competition. DDG or Bing are, to me, very bad (aren't they
almost the same anyway?)

It's unclear why that is, and why search is so hard, but obviously it is.

~~~
naibafo
Do you have an example or generally what kind of searches you are referring
to? My experience with ddg has been "good enough" at least. The few times I
don't find anything usable on ddg I ususally end up not finding anything on
Google either

~~~
chris_f
Not the poster, but here is an example. Elsewhere in this thread I posted a
fact that I knew, but wanted to double check. It was about the LexisNexis news
database containing 35k sources.

Here are the queries for "lexis news 35000" on Google and DDG:

[https://www.google.com/search?q=lexis%20news%2035000](https://www.google.com/search?q=lexis%20news%2035000)

[https://duckduckgo.com/?q=lexis+news+35000&ia=web](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=lexis+news+35000&ia=web)

The information I was looking for is in the first Google results. I didn't see
it on the first page of DDG at all.

This was just my last search as an example without even trying too hard to
come up with one.

I like DDG, but Bing (where the majority of DDG's organic results come from)
is not as good as Google for organic web results IMO.

~~~
bmn__
You are mistaken in assessing the situation, this has nothing to do with
results, but with query composition.

[https://duckduckgo.com/?q=lexisnexis+35000+news+sources](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=lexisnexis+35000+news+sources)

You have trained Google to recognise Lexis as an alias for LexisNexis. DDG
does not offer that, so one has to spell it out explicitly. You have to decide
whether it's acceptable for you to change habits back to the common ground for
Web searching.

The value provided by magic intent recognition (as opposed to traditional
searching for keywords) differs from person to person. On the whole, it's
likely for the better and that's why that feature was implemented at Google,
but I have also read countless complaints about it on HN because situationally
it pollutes results and can't be turned off.

~~~
chris_f
_You have trained Google to recognise Lexis as an alias for LexisNexis._

I disagree completely. Google knows Lexis is an alias for LexisNexis, but I
did not train it from an individual level filter bubble perspective.

Look at the below results. They are sourced from Google but proxied so that
Google doesn't get any information on the end user. The firsts result should
be one that provides the relevant article I was initially looking for. [0]

[https://www.runnaroo.com/search?term=lexis+news+35000](https://www.runnaroo.com/search?term=lexis+news+35000)

Just one final point. Half the results on the DDG page for initial "Lexis"
search I ran are for the car company "Lexus". So let's not pretend that DDG is
respecting user search queries.

[0] [http://www.lexisnexis.com.sg/en-
sg/products/nexis.page](http://www.lexisnexis.com.sg/en-
sg/products/nexis.page)

------
bulldog13
DuckDuckGo is finally good enough to use as a daily driver.

About 2 years ago I tried it and I constantly found myself using !g to get
decent results.

Now I only need to use !g some of the time for programming or technical
searches. It works great for everything else.

I just wanted to add this because I was anti-DuckDuckGo for awhile until I
recently retried it.

~~~
speg
Yep. I switched to DDG last year and haven’t looked back. Between
Safari/Firefox, DDG, Fastmail, and Apple Photos I think I’ve moved myself
almost entirely off of Google.

Recently set up a Pi-hole to shield me from the rest. What else am I missing?
Oh, YouTube! Drat. I’m a sucker for hobby videos on there. I’ve seen a couple
of alternative front ends but nothing that has really stuck so far.

~~~
theferalrobot
How are you liking Apple photos, considering the switch myself

~~~
speg
I'm happy with it. I'm not sure why I resisted turning on iCloud Photos. It
makes cross device management a non-issue. Now I just need to find the time to
cull my 20k something photos...

The major sticking point remaining is a shared library. I have my photos. My
wife has hers. How do we manage photos of our children without duplicating?

------
politelemon
While I am supportive of their business model, and search functionality, I
find it off-putting the way they speak of privacy but then use maps provided
by a GAFAM which are ultimately profit oriented and can _not_ be trusted to
safeguard privacy regardless of their marketing. OSM would be a great choice
here. I'll even dare to speculate that they were financially incentivized to
make their choice in the face of a superior and actually privacy-oriented
choice.

~~~
naibafo
You can use different Map backends for the map functionality, OSM amongst them

~~~
newsch
Is there a way to do this for the maps search? I only see an option to change
the directions provider.

------
virvar
This is anecdotal, but I had a positive experience with the lack of privacy
recently. I bought a baby stroller, after doing the typical research and
finding a used model, I ended up buying a new one from some babyshop. All the
pictures had shown the thing with the stroller “hat/head/sunscreen thing”
(sorry I don’t know the English word for kalche), anyway, it wasn’t included
and that was why the brand new stroller had been priced the same as the used
ones.

But it’s bought and it’s nice, so whatever I hit the manufacturer website and
find the correct product and google it, and get a flash sale from one of our
most prominent baby stores. It was 350 Danish kr including delivery. Without
closing the tap I check a few baby shops and a price checker website and see
it’s actually 600-700 Danish krs everywhere, including on from the company the
flash sale on google is form. So I buy it.

Apparently I hit the right combination of search history, and store
advertising/inventory at exactly the right time.

Being curious I called my local baby store to ask why they could flash sale me
at half price, and after a bit back and forth they apparently do this thing
where they’ll catch you early with a cheap item and then when you come back
they to buy it the next day it’ll be priced higher, except by then you’ve made
up your mind to buy it and will pay the extra and I was just lucky having
already made up my mind when I got it because the other store has been cheeky.

Not really related to DDG, but it’s the first time selling my privacy has paid
off.

~~~
yaktubi
I feel like the Airline industry does this when they say, “only 4 more tickets
left!” Or “2 tickets recently purchased!”

There’s probably some terminology for this in game theory (well, general
salesmanship too)

~~~
Neff
In the UX world they are usually called urgency or scarcity triggers [1][2].
They also play in to the social default bias [3] people tend to have, where
when alone you tend to do things that you know others have done.

1:
[https://www.researchgate.net/publication/259906084_Scarcity_...](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/259906084_Scarcity_messages_A_consumer_competition_perspective)
2 (PDF):
[https://www.uvic.ca/socialsciences/economics/assets/docs/sem...](https://www.uvic.ca/socialsciences/economics/assets/docs/seminars/Online%20Scarcity%20Informational%20Value1015.pdf)
3: [https://www.coglode.com/gem/social-default-
bias](https://www.coglode.com/gem/social-default-bias)

------
zerr
While we are at it - what is the business model for freeware web browsers such
as Vivaldi, Firefox, etc... I know they have some deals with MS, Google and
friends but how such deals are done? Is it from some personal contacts or do
you have to apply officially? What are the particular numbers - is it
something you have to negotiate? What is the range in this case? etc...

~~~
MattGaiser
Mozilla makes a referral fee from search engine searches made with the
browser. Their revenue is in the hundreds of millions.

[https://www.cnet.com/news/google-firefox-search-deal-
gives-m...](https://www.cnet.com/news/google-firefox-search-deal-gives-
mozilla-more-money-to-push-privacy/)

~~~
jl2718
So basically the advertising companies own the whole stack. Explains a lot.

------
keiferski
FAQ on their own site: [https://help.duckduckgo.com/company/advertising-and-
affiliat...](https://help.duckduckgo.com/company/advertising-and-affiliates/)

~~~
markosaric
SpreadPrivacy is an official DuckDuckGo blog too.

------
x32n23nr
> What Is the Business Model for DuckDuckGo?

The difference between the revenue from Bing Ads they show and the money they
have to pay Bing for their search API.

~~~
sct202
I'm surprised they didn't mention it at all on the page. It's definitely
mentioned on other pages about how to get your ads to show up on DDG.

~~~
x32n23nr
I'm not. Being a re-seller of search and ads is not an impressive narrative
for a company that sells the illusion of a search alternative. DDG adds value
in the privacy realm, and I'd rather have it exist than not, but its continued
existence depends on the continued will of a search api provider to sell and
in the western world there's basically only 2 in that game: Google and Bing.

------
Grimm1
So first off personal bias, whize.co is the search engine I and my co-founder
have been working on, it was nice to see basically our intended business model
entirely validated by this article. Aside from the work we've done to validate
it of course.

We entirely agree with their stated aims here but believe we can produce more
quality search results than many current engines, hopefully it works out.

~~~
mdaniel
> This alpha is limited to GitHub results.

ok, so:

[https://alpha.whize.co/search?q=KubeConfigLoader&page=1&n=10](https://alpha.whize.co/search?q=KubeConfigLoader&page=1&n=10)

cheerfully says: "Showing 0 - 0 out of 0 for: KubeConfigLoader" although in
your defense, it was blazingly fast to return that result. The shape of your
XHR response seems to indicate you have an ES instance with only one shard, so
maybe the site is still running in demo mode or something?

contrast that with:
[https://duckduckgo.com/?q=site%3Agithub.com+KubeConfigLoader](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=site%3Agithub.com+KubeConfigLoader)

As a meta observation, in the bottom corner of every DDG result that I've ever
received is a "Send Feedback" button, allowing me to advise them of bad search
results in a very low friction way, but I had to come here to report my
experience with your site

~~~
Grimm1
Yup still Demo mode the index is more than a few months old at this point.
We're close to launching a beta with a much larger unrestricted index and a
re-crawl strategy that keeps things fresh.

We've also changed our ranking methodology. The alpha / demo there was focused
on novelty so if you search say "machine learning" you'd get repos that were
recently active, starred and (hopefully) relevant to the topic, worth noting
we also hard down-ranked repos that had been around for a while to let the
smaller ones show through.

Through user conversation we moved away from focusing on novelty and moved
onto "information staleness" the idea that elements in search results do not
decay in relevance as quickly as they should based on real world events that
happen around them. Happy to talk more about it if you want.

------
neebz
It's a bit strange but for me Google's biggest pull is live scores.

I follow cricket, tennis and football. And all the dedicated websites are
heavy and slow (cricinfo, espn etc). Google scores are quick to load and
update even before the rest.

~~~
darkerside
Posted the same elsewhere. I've been able to change my own behavior to look
for sports reporting elsewhere. Agreed Google has done an excellent job of it.

------
vs2
I am going to build my own search engine but with a monthly subscription fee.
No ads, no tracking and I don't keep logs of your activity. So across between
a VPN and a Search engine!

~~~
hnarn
I admire the initiative but there is no way people will pay for a search
engine.

~~~
_puk
Quite the generalisation..

To provide a counter generalisation, I am sure a certain percentage would pay
for a niche search engine if it provided specific value.

I mean, LexisNexis news search exists, and is far from free.

~~~
nojito
Because Lexis has a massive database of news stories and the rights to share
it.

~~~
garmaine
I would wager that Google's database of new stories is bigger. LexisNexis
survives partly through institutional inertia, but also I expect because
they've tailored their search product to their specific niche in a way that is
much more useful than Google's general-purpose algorithms.

~~~
chris_f
_I would wager that Google 's database of new stories is bigger._

You are correct. Lexis only has 35k news sources. Their one strength is that
their news archive goes back to the late 70s.

The real difference is that Lexis's core business is B2B. Enterprise pricing
defies the laws of reason for what people will pay for software vs B2C.

~~~
garmaine
Google's news articles goes back way further than the 70's. They've been
scanning newspapers and integrating digitization archives. This is why you can
you can look at word usage trends centuries back. But it's not very well
integrated into search.

------
jaybeeayyy
I saw a DDG billboard in my city the other day. I was really surprised they
did any type of advertising like that!

------
rkangel
DDG is surprisingly good, but still not good enough. I have my desktop browser
using it, but still haven't on mobile.

When searching for technical queries Google tends to give much more useful
answers - useful is the key word here. To give an example from yesterday, the
query 'elixir zlib'.

In DDG I get links to C files in Linux kernels on a server called elixir. I
get a useful answer 5 results down (which is fine, it's there). In Google, the
first result I get is the erlang zlib documentation (which is what you
actually use in elixir).

Things like error messages, queries involving the name of a programming
language etc. are often just not as good in DDG.

~~~
bogwog
> Things like error messages, queries involving the name of a programming
> language etc. are often just not as good in DDG.

I don't have any problem with those types of searches on DDG. Even obscure
error messages turn up most of the time, and when they don't turn up in DDG
they don't turn up in Google either.

Even when I do searches for a relatively less popular language like Haxe, I
don't have trouble finding what I'm looking for. I only remember a handful of
times over the 3+ years I've been using DDG that Google returned an ancient
IRC log referencing my issue while DDG didn't return anything, but just the
same I've had Google return irrelevant results while DDG gave me exactly what
I was looking for.

Since my anecdotes offsets your anecdotes, the only conclusion is that
anecdotes are useless to compare these things :)

------
treebornfrog
From the article: "Alarmingly, Google now deploys hidden trackers on 76% of
websites across the web to monitor your behavior"

Its not Google that deploys these, it's webmasters who want free Google
analytics. Big difference.

------
mikorym
I think it would be cool if one started an online advertising company in 2020
that employs about 50% graphic designers and 50% other and that specialises on
providing online JPEG or similar images for websites, and where each add is
completely human generated / human curated.

Also, the sizes should be completely fixed like you can choose between
predetermined pixel ratios. Like maybe 162x100 or 1600x30 or whatever.

With people _angsty_ with social media, I think it could be quite refreshing
to have a trip back in time.

------
DarkWiiPlayer
I find it very interesting that this article isn't just all "We're more holier
[SIC] than google", but instead also argues that google could just as well
adopt this busyness model. It doesn't defend google, but it doesn't paint it
as this intrinsically evil IT-Monster that must be defeated, as many privacy
advocates tend to do.

------
princevegeta89
If anything, I feel DDG should get a more serious name, and one that doesn't
sound funny. Seriously, whenever I hear DuckDuckGo, I feel it sounds like some
blog or some meme sharing site. This only hurts its brand value and make it
seem trivial.

------
zanmat0
One huge thing stopping me switching over is not being able to see Google
reviews for restaraunts, doctors, etc. Yelp is, in my opinion, much less
trustworthy and it would be nice to be able to toggle this the same way Google
maps can be a preference.

------
cercatrova
Some commentors are saying Google is worse. As someone who uses Google, what's
been worse about it? With regards to ads, I don't see them as I use uBlock
Origin on desktop and mobile (as well as other ad blockers and no-script
extensions).

~~~
mav3rick
What's worse is that these people hate Google. Many do because they failed the
interviews there and openly state this as the reason for their criticism.

------
eloc49
I think Google only keeps DuckDuckGo around so they can claim they have
“competition.”

~~~
gyulai
Why would it be up to Google to decide whether or not DuckDuckGo gets to "be
around"?

~~~
maze-le
I am also confused about this wording but I assume it refers to the
duckduckgo-app on android devices. It would be blatantly anti-competitive if
google would refuse the ddg app in their app store, solely because they
compete with them in the search-engine market -- there are legal mechanisms
against this behavior.

~~~
gyulai
Agreed. And there are laws against this sort of thing, and the regulators are
slowly but surely catching up to the fact that they will have to start
actually enforcing them.

------
surround
Interestingly, DuckDuckGo allows you to turn off advertisements in their
settings.

[https://duckduckgo.com/settings#general](https://duckduckgo.com/settings#general)

------
bernardlunn
I use DDG and hardly ever use Google. Apart from privacy, I like one feature
which is searching news by date. Anybody had experience with their API?

------
archived22
This is some good news. I was worried that they are not making enough money
and might shutdown. I will continue using it.

------
Vecr
It would be nice if DuckDuckGo supported IPv6, it does not appear to use an
AAAA record in DNS.

------
bluedino
I've been seeing DDG billboards all over, which seems weird.

~~~
cl0wnshoes
I just saw my first one yesterday and made me instantly question how they paid
for that and what their business model was.

------
janwillemb
Tldr:

DuckDuckGo is profitable

\- mostly by keyword-based search ads

\- also by affiliate links to Amazon e.a.

------
ionwake
I’ve always had a bad vibe about duckduckgo

~~~
drukenemo
Less than ideal case-scenario, users are spreading their data between Google
and Duck Duck, Bing etc. Not empowering a single agent. In the worst case Duck
sell our data to Google. I find that unlikely.

