
DuckDuckGo, Google, and Android choice screens - x32n23nr
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/duckduckgo-android-choice-screen-search
======
skrebbel
Does anyone here understand how it is that Bing is powering DDG?

Does DDG just generate lots of Bing searches and scrape the result? If so, why
wouldn't MS block them?

Or did they strike some sort of deal? If so, how can that be in Bing's
interest? They're just creating a Bing competitor, right? Given that Bing
reasonably wants to be the #2 search engine, supporting a formidable
competitor striving for the same spot doesn't sound like a winning strategy
for Bing. Right?

What am I missing? :-)

~~~
luhn
Microsoft offers a Bing API [1]. So Microsoft is getting paid by DDG for using
Bing. Given Google's domination of the search market, I think it makes sense
for Microsoft to sell their search API and let other companies help chip away
at Google's user base.

[1] [https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/cognitive-
service...](https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/cognitive-
services/bing-web-search-api/)

~~~
chris_f
Correct. The list price for the Bing web search API is $30/10,000 searches. I
wouldn't be surprised if DDG was also able to negotiate a volume discount.

In addition, DDG serves ads from the Microsoft ad network, so they will also
make money there.

Also, worth noting that Google provides the same type of service through API.
I built a search engine [0] where Google web results are one of many sources
used.

[0] [https://www.runnaroo.com](https://www.runnaroo.com)

~~~
glitchc
If DDG gains sufficient marketshare, MS may just buy them out, for a steal
perhaps since they have the ability to tighten the screws. So DDG is little
more than an MS proxy aimed at Google’s search business. It’s not really an
underdog, just two behemoths fighting for control of the search business.
Sounds more like “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.”

~~~
ISL
This is only true if DDG isn't investing into its own backend as it grows.

If all the users go to DDG.com, it won't matter if Bing has a great backend or
not.

I've recently lived this experience in another context. We built a great
backend for a partner that was good at publicity. When they redirected users
to their internal backend, we were dead in the water. It didn't matter that
the partner struggled with their backend and ours was better. We hadn't
invested resources in independent publicity, so users couldn't find us. It was
a hard lesson to learn.

~~~
yellowapple
And to that point, DDG does have its own crawler, and I believe leverages
other third-parties as well (I know Yandex was historically in the mix, for
example). So if Microsoft did try to strongarm DuckDuckGo, DDG would have
other options, even if less-than-ideal.

~~~
skinnymuch
There’s no one close to Google in the US. After a big drop, there’s no one
REMOTELY close to Bing for 2nd best results. Bing dropping DDG in 2020 or 2021
would be a death kneel for them for US search results. Probably many other
countries too. Yandex is too far off right now to be a replacement. I haven’t
checked Yandex in a bit of time though. Perhaps they drastically improved.

People in tech circles always say DDG has a crawler. I know they do. No one
ever says how big it is. I have a hard time believing it’s crawling more than
a couple percent what Bing is crawling.

~~~
yellowapple
> No one ever says how big [DuckDuckBot] is

One complicating matter is that it specializes in DDG's "Instant Answers";
apparently¹ the "source from other search engines" approach really only
applies to the traditional results list, while DuckDuckBot is focused
specifically on the Instant Answers, effectively optimizing for the absolute
most relevant first result possible. So in its current state DuckDuckBot ain't
exactly comparable in purpose.

Still, I don't see much that'd be stopping DDG from ramping this up and having
it generate the traditional list of results, too. Yeah, obviously the results
for quite a few queries will be far from ideal, but if the query already hits
one of DDG's curated data sources, I suspect the results might already be
_better_ if anything.

\----

¹: [https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-
pages/results/so...](https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-
pages/results/sources/)

------
benbristow
DuckDuckGo is good, I've used it for a few months at a time in the past.

Always end up switching back to Google because of local results (I live in the
UK, DDG's results are very US-centric even when local results are turned on).
Maybe it's gotten better recently. I've seen lots of billboards for DuckDuckGo
recently around my hometown in Paisley, Scotland; not a very techie place so
they're clearly trying to gain a reach!

I've been using Bing for the past few months and been quite happy with it,
only switching to use Google for Maps results and the odd very niche query.

The bonus of Bing is that it pays you in supermarket shopping vouchers where
Google doesn't. Sold!

~~~
duckkg5
I've (unexpectedly) seen billboards in western North Carolina for DDG in the
last few weeks.

~~~
karmelapple
Same in the greater Boston area.

~~~
coddle-hark
They were running ads at a mall where we live in Sweden. Not even in
Stockholm!

------
bla3
I like DDG, but this is strange rhetoric. DDG is as much for-profit as Google.
It's not *fighting back", it's trying to make a profit by trying to position
itself in a way that's different from Google and in a way that it's hoping is
compelling. So far, it's mostly failing at that and only serves a niche
population. A growing one, though.

~~~
crawlcrawler
>> it's trying to make a profit by trying to position itself in a way that's
different from Google and in a way that it's hoping is compelling

Looks like DDG is "fighting back" the right for people to have privacy online.

~~~
godelski
This is what is compelling, to me, about DDG. It isn't the profit that bugs me
about Google, it is the data collection. It isn't even that I think Google is
doing anything nefarious with that data, but the difference is that I'm giving
something to Google and not to DDG and DDG's results are good enough to not
warrant giving Google anything (i.e. DDG works great for >90% of my searches).

------
leephillips
“we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased
towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.”

\-- Sergey Brin and Larry Page:

[http://www.zdnet.com/article/google-advertising-and-
search-e...](http://www.zdnet.com/article/google-advertising-and-search-
engine-bias/)

~~~
sidibe
How is DuckDuckGo funded?

~~~
rement
Ads. However, DuckDuckGo does not run their own ad network. The ads you are
shown are only based on the current keyword from your search.

edit: Here is a quora answer from the CEO at DuckDuckGo posted a couple years
ago talking about how the company is funded. [0]

[0]: [https://www.quora.com/How-is-DuckDuckGo-
funded?share=1](https://www.quora.com/How-is-DuckDuckGo-funded?share=1)

------
dageshi
Google got rich finding the information you wanted.

~~~
crazyjncsu
And many here are too young to remember the hellscape of competing search
engines predating Google: Infoseek, excite, yahoo, altavista, etc.

Their poor experience and dubious practices likely spawned Google's internal
motto: "don't be evil"

~~~
na85
>Their poor experience and dubious practices likely spawned Google's internal
motto: "don't be evil"

Sure, I remember the bad ol' days. But Google has (IMHO) become the thing they
set out to disrupt. The quality of Google results has declined dramatically in
the last 5 years or so.

It's all marketing bullshit now, just as Altavista or whomever was. Finding
content I want, as opposed to content advertisers want me to find, is becoming
very difficult via Google.

~~~
v7p1Qbt1im
You could argue that the quality of the web itself has declined in much the
same way. SEO is a billion dollar industry with the singular goal of analyzing
everything search engines do to push whatever crap they want to run ads on.

As Google is the market leader, every website is optimized for its ranking.
Much like leading operating systems have the most malware issues.

Many people on HN complain that blogs and personal websites aren‘t prioritized
in results anymore compared to bigger news sites. I imagine it‘s incredibly
difficult to separate legitimate, trustworthy posts from useless blog spam and
agenda/conspiracy-pushing crap in a reliable automated way.

~~~
majormajor
I don't think Google has declined because the quality of the web has declined,
I think Google has fostered laziness and a optimistic reliance on algorithms
that has caused the quality of the web to decline.

In the early days, algorithmic search wasn't the only way you found stuff.
Links had a lot more use, and people would spend time looking at, cataloguing,
and grooming lists of resources.

This doesn't scale well if you want a one-second answer to any possible
question, but the SEO-gamified Google world is far from perfect in that regard
either.

Maybe we just need to give up on that "any answer to anything at your
fingertips in one second" goal.

------
Semaphor
It’s funny. I’m currently having some hardware problems, figuring out what the
problem is, I reinstalled windows. A lot. And every time FF defaulted to
google (because apparently Search Engines are not synced). And holy hell.
Google Germany results are utterly unusable. For anything I searched that had
an original download site, google gives me some scammy German site that either
relinks the original site after several (ad-riddled) clicks or even worse, has
their own installer, presumably bundling the original with adware.

I always read here about people complaining about how bad DDG’s localized
results are. Considering they usually talk about switching back to google, I
can’t comprehend that.

~~~
BiteCode_dev
I am one of the complainers about the bad ddg localized results, espacially
for french ones.

But one day, I experienced what it was to use Google without ublock origin, by
mistake. It was a horrible mess.

Then it hit me: the main benefit of DDG is that it's clean, even if you don't
know anything about ad blockers.

~~~
scaryclam
Funnily enough, the clean thing is what really kick-started google (at least
for the group of people I know). Going from the unholy mess of links on Yahoo!
to google with their single search box and a couple of links was a giant step
forward.

~~~
eitland
Even more funny they had a decade of my searches and online activity before I
started adblocking and supposedly some of the sharpest minds of our time
employeed to make me click on ads and I can't recall buying a single thing
from a Google ad, mostly because the ads where ridiculously misplaced.

Facebook on the other hand, a company where I only have a minimal profile
since I utterly distrust them[0] manages to serve me not only less annoying
but sometimes actual useful ads (as: I've bought things from Instagram or
Facebook ads that have saved me money and improved my quality of life).

[0]: Google I just dislike and treat with caution. They seem competent with
data security and obsessed with protecting all their juicy data even if - at
least to me - they seem so utterly incompetent at uskng it to match ads to
profiles that I have suggested it might be some sort of scam against ad buyers
;-)

------
chrisco255
I've been using DDG for a year now and don't miss Google. I feel like I often
get worse results on Google as I have to sift through more ads and click bait.

The only thing I worry about, is if DDG gets too big, what stops them from
becoming Google-like?

~~~
loufe
If DDG gets big I would argue Google will still be in play, and by that time I
think the discussions around search engine options in the general populace
will make it such that the space is more competitive.

------
whisps
I've used DDG as my default search for both desktop and mobile for about a
year now. It's good enough in a lot of cases, though I still find myself using
Google for a lot of local searches and current events-related searches.

~~~
x32n23nr
If you consider it moral to block first party ads on Google, most adblockers
should prevent ads from being loaded. Are you using one?

------
mohan85
I am not against the need for data privacy, protection, etc., but got this
question when looking at this.

How much people got rich from Google - by quickly accessing the relevant
blogs, articles or information, finding answers to the questions, code
snippets and so on?

~~~
themodelplumber
This is an interesting question. There's an economic value aspect to the
issue, in that way. There's also an ethical and emotional aspect. Those who
learned about these last two aspects later may feel like they could have done
just as well had they explored alternatives. Instead they unknowingly went
with the service that was not as transparent with them as it should have been.

In this way I think it's fair to say that while individuals may consider the
trade-off totally worth it or not worth it, they also have grounds to
complain. Just like in society in general, one economic solution does not
unmake all the ethical problems. Human culture has been working hard at
transcending this dichotomy and people just expect more creativity and ethical
intelligence these days. The attention given to DDG is I think a testament to
this kind of market voice.

~~~
mohan85
I also agree that this is a people problem. But moving to DDG is also not a
reliable solution according to me. When we imagine DDG at google scale and
quality, DDG will need so much resources and money to maintain their service
at that scale and there is no guarantee that their current business model will
be enough to continue their operations. Between closing out the business Vs
increasing revenue, I am sure majority of businesses will choose the later. At
least for now we can say it is focused on privacy to take some market share
out of Google.

------
surround
I wish that DuckDuckGo would focus more on their search engine. DuckDuckHack
was responsible for instant answers, but they discontinued it in favor of
developing their browser extension.

[https://duckduckhack.com/](https://duckduckhack.com/)

Their browser extension sucks. It’s just a bunch of different privacy
extensions (Privacy Badger, HTTPS Everywhere, TOSDR) which have been watered
down and mashed together. And it automatically changes your default search
engine to DDG, which was the real intent for developing the extension all
along.

Instant answers are important. Ever search for the definition of a word
([https://duckduckgo.com/?q=assonance](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=assonance)),
or want to set a timer
([https://duckduckgo.com/?q=timer](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=timer))? These
were made possible by DuckDuckHack. Now they are stuck; they cannot be
changed, and no new ones can be created.

------
dang
I couldn't find any representative phrase [1] in the article that would make a
better (less baity, more accurate and neutral) title, so have taken a crack at
making something up. If someone has a better suggestion we can change it
again.

[1]
[https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20representative%20title&sort=byDate&type=comment)

------
bko
I love ddg and use it as my primary search engine, resorting to !g for google
queries about 25% of the time. If anyone is curious about how ddg results
compare to that of google, check out a site I made Search Compare [0] that
shows the results of each side by side. Note that it looks at the html version
of ddg results. One downside of ddg is that they do a worse job at filtering
our conspiracy theories

[0] search-compare.netlify.app

~~~
benbristow
> One downside of ddg is that they do a worse job at filtering our conspiracy
> theories

I'd argue that's not particularly a bad thing as it means there's less
censorship going on.

Even if most conspiracy theories are completely bonkers

------
wdn
I used DDG until I've searched for "PDF watermark remover free" and the top
result is watermarkremoveronline.com, a scam site. Probably with malware as
well.

I did the same search on Bing and Google and the scam site is not part of the
search result.

DDG emphasizes on privacy. Yet, allow scamming site returned as top result.

------
mrgreenfur
I like DDG as much as the next person, but does anyone else think that Mozilla
should offer a privacy-friendly search engine? I know it's a big part of their
revenue model, but it seems like a core piece of internet infrastructure that
should not be so open to monetization.

~~~
osamagirl69
I would rather Mozilla sticks to making a browser that works well and respects
privacy. Generally their explorations outside of Firefox (Pocket, the Dr.
Robot fiasco, etc) have been regressions of the aforementioned goals.

~~~
wolco
Mr Robot to you. Some saw that as a success.

------
memexy
> The sheet of paper led to the creation of I’ve Got a Fang, a crowd-sourced
> site where people could contribute authoritative URLs on particular
> subjects. Weinberg, who lives in Philadelphia, believed the knowledge from
> people’s heads could be better than Google’s algorithms.

Google initially was bootstrapped by crawling such curated lists. Now that
people are relying on search instead of curating their own lists search
quality is starting to decline. So I'm going to make a prediction. Federated
knowledge bases with curated links are going to make a comeback because only
humans can create semantically meaningful content for other humans.

~~~
slim
I think it's already solved by social networks. You could consider twitter for
example a curated list.

~~~
memexy
Social networks only allow very constrained forms of knowledge engineering.
When I mentioned knowledge bases with links I meant in the sense of a
programmable memex where the documents can be connected, annotated, and
presented in arbitrary ways.

------
mattlondon
Hopefully this will allow me to change the hard-coded Google search box on
pixel home screens!

I have the DDG search widget, but I cannot remove the Google search box that
appears to be hard-coded to the home screen with no way to remove it or change
the search provider (... unless someone knows otherwise?) So now I have two
search widgets...

I can use a separate launcher I guess, but it would be nice if I could just
configure this without resorting to that.

------
Ygg2
I fear this is too little, too late. Also Google is defacto a browser monopoly
too.

~~~
AnimalMuppet
Defacto browser monopoly? What is Chrome's market/usage share?

~~~
staplers
Tracker/analytics data won't be correct for Firefox or people using privacy-
centric browsers as they inherently block that. I think it'd be hard to get a
real number without polling a lot of people.

A lot of people assume Chrome has the monopoly based on looking at false
analytics.

~~~
lucasmullens
Firefox definitely sends its user-agent to servers, so wouldn't server-side
analytics still work?

~~~
aembleton
I wish Cloudflare would publish stats based on user agents. They must have a
good idea about the real numbers

~~~
jgrahamc
What do you want to know?

~~~
aembleton
What percentage of traffic comes from Firefox.

------
viach
Competing with Google is hard and DDG serves very specific niche trying to do
it. With this niche growing big enough both Bing and Yandex share it, in a
way. Imagine a successful business which is built solely on your API. I think
the real problem DDG solves is the need of independent brand for Bing and
Yandex, fitting this niche.

------
shadowgovt
I'd love to read this article, but this website apparently uses cookies to
vend information about me to advertisers.

~~~
badRNG
Here you go: [https://outline.com/S7vXVy](https://outline.com/S7vXVy)

In the future, it may be worthwhile to download some plugins like Cookie
Autodelete, uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger, etc.

------
TheJoeMan
I would be more worried about Google's auction process. It's cleverly evil,
because the bid price to be on the start screen will asymptotically approach
the phone owner's lifetime value from search ads. Then Google couldn't give
two farts which search engine you use because they get paid either way.

~~~
s17n
The point is to prevent Google from getting paid for the work that the put
into Android, the point is to foment competition in the search space.

------
ed25519FUUU
From their open positions:

> _A fundamental understanding of complex data structures and algorithms,
> which enables you to develop and apply new solutions and confidently
> navigate and improve existing code (ours is mostly written with Perl)._

Would love to hear more about this. That kind of surprised (frightened?) me to
be honest.

------
gagahpangeran
I've been using DDG for almost two years. I often search the error message of
my code as keyword and then there's a box that show the best solution (mostly
from stackoverflow). I use that solution and mostly it works and made my work
faster.

------
carterklein13
It's interesting seeing DDG trying to break into a larger space. In my
experience, the only people I know that know DDG are also people in tech.

I live in NYC and I'm seeing lots of billboards in the city and on highways in
NJ surrounding the city as I have family that regularly travels in/out. I've
seen a lot of whack billboards in my day but it really caught me by surprise
seeing them try and make this push. It's exciting, and hope it'll gain some
traction. However, I think the vast majority of people will still just use
whatever browser and whatever search comes bundled with their machine.

------
gundmc
I'm surprised that there are nearly zero comments about the subject of the
article - the choice screens and associated auction.

It seems like a reasonable implementation to me. Maybe the number of choices
can be upped from 3 to 5 to help drive prices down. But surely there has to be
some upper bound of the number of options?

------
paulcole
DuckDuckGo has been absolutely atrocious for me. Searches that Google can
absolutely nail, DDG returns results where the right thing isn't even on the
front page.

I tried to pretend like I cared more about privacy than results but the god's
honest truth is I don't. I want the results I want and Google provides them.

~~~
TheJoeMan
Well say you're learning Swift programming. On google, the 12th search for
"override init" will assume you mean Swift. On DDG, you need to make each
search self-contained, so "Swift override init"

------
throwaway4715
How does Duck Duck Go make money? I clicked around their site for a while, but
didn't find anything.

~~~
timerol
Ads, but without targeting. They sell the search terms entered in an
anonymized way. So you can buy an ad that will display to everyone who
searches DuckDuckGo for "vacuum cleaner". You cannot buy an ad that will
display to women aged 30-40 who live alone in a zip code where the median
income is above $100k when they search "vacuum cleaner".

~~~
Eli_P
What's interesting, does that strategy end like: less effective ads -> need
more of them -> raise ad price + show more of them?

Another thing is regarding k-anonymity which I suppose privacy-first guys
would use. If I gather user info with a high entropy, I don't have an
incentive to sell it to anybody and create a competitor, and it'd probably
illegal to do that. But if I anonymize the data set into a k-anon data it's
now less restrictive to sell from legal point, also I'll probably sell that
data to third parties just to make ends meet.

------
Taylor_OD
I have used DDG for the last few years as my search engine and phone browser.
I'd like to move off chrome on the desktop as well but it feels like the
changeover costs of losing some small chrome extensions that I love would be
too high.

~~~
51Cards
I'm curious what those extentions are as Firefox has a fairly roboust
extension environment.

------
random3
I understand the monopoly concern, but disagree with the title. Somehow the
fact that a company got rich by using your data is the problem and most
important aspect to put in the title, not the monopoly?

------
telaelit
I use DDG for all my general searching, but I've found that Google is better
for searching for technical things. So I haven't stopped using Google Search
completely :(

------
jessriedel
Data about me is not the same thing as my data.

~~~
crawlcrawler
Why not?

~~~
jessriedel
In this case, "my" is being used to denote some sort of ownership (in the
sense of "my bike") rather than mere association ("my mom"). It's being used
to convince the reader that they should feel that something that is rightfully
theirs has been taken/exploited by someone else.

But insofar as we have (formal and informal) notions of information ownership,
we (sensibly) assign ownership of that info based on who collects/computes
that info, not the person about whom that info refers. If I collect
information about how many cars go down the highway each day, the only entity
who might be the owner of that data is me, not the driver's of the cars or the
city through which the highway runs.

If Google collects and exploits information about you (e.g., how many web
searches per month you make), there certainly may be _privacy_ principles they
are violating, but not ownership issues. If Google were taking information you
_had_ generated/collected (e.g., if they sold illegal copies of the novel you
wrote on Google Docs), that would be an ownership issue, but that is usually
not the sort of thing people are worried about.

------
tictok4
I like DDG but always seem to get Russian localized results. I am in the USA.

------
compsciphd
hah, I was going to write a Ask HN but never got around to it that I had
noticed that bing and DDG has the exact same results for many of my searches.

------
bashallah
Ironically DDG was down today about an hour ago

~~~
x32n23nr
Ironically, Bing (powering DDG) is not mentioned in the article at all.

~~~
gen3
Yes it was?

“Today, DuckDuckGo combines data from more than 400 sources into its search
results: Microsoft’s Bing is predominantly used to surface relevant pages, but
Wikipedia, Apple Maps, TripAdvisor and DuckDuckGo’s own web crawler also
contribute.”

------
ta17711771
See also: Qwant.com Startpage.com Searx

~~~
DrPhish
I host my own searx instance and can totally recommend it. I have it set as
the default engine on all my devices and I don't miss google at all.

Not sure why you'd go to the trouble of avoiding google and just give all your
data away to ddg? Anyone other than yourself is liable to become/be acquired
by some shady entity

