

Linux Mint signs a partnership with DuckDuckGo - dexen
http://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=1884

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nextparadigms
Does DuckDuckGo pay for the Bing engine? And what happens if Microsoft tries
to stop them from using it, or they put some limitations on it for 3rd
parties?

~~~
mitko
What other options for backend besides Bing are there if one would like to do
make a new search engine?

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gaoprea
The Common Crawl index, already has 5bn ranked pages, and the data is open to
everyone - <http://www.commoncrawl.org/>

~~~
110101001010100
From the genius who brought us what Google adapted as AdSense. I applaud this
effort. I'm no Spike Lee, but in my opinion this is doing the right thing.

Let people compete over what to do with the raw data (data which is of course
publicly accessible but subject to the strange inequities of crawling), how
best to process and present it, not over access to it. DDG has to pay Yahoo!
for a BOSS license. That is just strange when you think about how the raw data
was obtained. It is publicly available information.

Nothing against Yahoo! for doing that (selling access to publicly available
data), as there are many other examples of this practice across web- "everyone
else is doing it". But I do not think it is "the right thing" to do.

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yters
Yeah, why do I have to pay for things like a car and what not? They all come
from publicly accessible goods. Bunch of scammers.

~~~
110101001010100
Maybe the question is not why you have to pay for your car, but why you _do
not_ have to pay to view information via a website, store a copy of this in
RAM and/or save a copy using secondary storage. Why is it typically "free" for
you to do that?

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lordlarm
DuckDuckGo was also added to the Opera Browser, approx. 1 month ago. [1]

Anyone know how DuckDuckGo do monetization?

[1]: [http://my.opera.com/ruario/blog/2011/10/19/the-hidden-
featur...](http://my.opera.com/ruario/blog/2011/10/19/the-hidden-feature-
of-11-52-duckduckgo-is-added-to-opera)

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maximusprime
afaik they rewrite any amazon and ebay results to link with their own
affiliate ID :/

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blahedo
Why the :/ ? DDG isn't taking away anyone _else's_ affiliation, right? This
isn't really any different than leaving the referer-id in there, except that
it shoehorns "referer" into the "affiliate" api that Amazon et al are geared
to pay money for. (Right?)

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pantaloons
It creates an incentive for DDG to favor Amazon, or other affiliate pages in
their rankings.

A search engine where you pay for Ad placement is very different to a search
engine where you (effectively) pay for rankings.

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darasen
That's right because no one pays for their google ranking. oh wait...

~~~
robrenaud
Who pays for their Google ranking? People might pay SEO companies to help them
rank better, but I am skeptical that they are paying Google for it.

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calloc
The only downside to DuckDuckGo is that the results it gives for some searches
of friends names are extremely stale pulling up old mailing list posts from
2006/2007 rather than showing their new content from their personal blog.
There seems to be a ridiculous amount of noise mixed in with signal which
makes it a no-go for me or for even suggesting it to my family.

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tutysara
Is it like a Tor for search engine where all the searches are performed by
DuckDuckGo, keeping the users away from tracking? I tried searching some terms
and it gives results pretty fast.I found no ads in their search
results,wondering how these guys are getting money to share their revenue with
Linux Mint and also pay MS for using Bing data. Making me doubt they might
push favorable content up.

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mkr-hn
There's an ad on the side.

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tutysara
yup there is a minimal ad on the side. I didn't appeared for the few queries I
had tried (people names). I tried searching for a laptop and there came the ad
on the side ;-)

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mechanical_fish
My god, it's yet _another_ piece of software called Mint. _Stop the branding
madness!_

Also frustrating is the fact that I couldn't spot the link from the official
Linux Mint blog to the "please tell me what Linux Mint is" page. I ultimately
resorted to Google. A conversion funnel tragedy.

~~~
eCa
> Also frustrating is the fact that I couldn't spot the link from the official
> Linux Mint blog to the "please tell me what Linux Mint is" page.

Yes, it's incomprehensible why so many companies: a) don't use their normal
headers for the blog, or at least b) put a prominent link back to the homepage
(like the logo, for instance).

However, when the blog is at <http://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=1884> it is not a
gigantic leap of thought to go check what might be at
<http://www.linuxmint.com/>, from where it's one click to the about page.

~~~
robotresearcher
> However, when the blog is at <http://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=1884> it is not a
> gigantic leap of thought to go check what might be at
> <http://www.linuxmint.com/>, from where it's one click to the about page.

I think the poster was commenting on the difficulty of getting to the main web
site, not the possibility. Having visitors hand-edit URIs is not considered
slick customer conversion.

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jorgecastillo
If anyone is interested in knowing how DuckDuckGo gets its results check:

[http://help.duckduckgo.com/customer/portal/articles/216399-s...](http://help.duckduckgo.com/customer/portal/articles/216399-sources)

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Nic0
I'm not sure about the partnership, does this means it will be the default
search engine for Linux Mint?

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orblivion
Since when do they use Bing? I thought they did their own indexing.

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slowpoke
My last information was that they used a combination of third party search
APIs (Yahoo, Bing, Google) and producing their own search content.

By now, in terms of functionality[1], I mostly use DDG for the bangs, having
set it as my default search engine in Firefox (keyword.URL in about:settings)
so I can search using the URL bar. I caught myself doing ^T and typing "!w
keywords" (to search wikipedia) on other people's computers more than once by
now.

[1] I originally switched because I'm very privacy conscious, and that's still
my most powerful argument for using DDG, but it's by far not the only strong
argument for duckgo'ing instead of googling.

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w1ntermute
> I caught myself doing ^T and typing "!w keywords" (to search wikipedia) on
> other people's computers more than once by now.

You realize that you don't have to use DDG for this, right? You can set up
keyword searches in the search bar in Firefox or Chrome (don't know about
other browsers) for _any_ site, not just those that DDG supports. Then just
type 'w <search>' into the location bar and hit enter for Wikipedia, for
example. You can even do cool things like set up custom searches, like my 'wl'
search, which automatically prepends 'list of' to any Wikpedia search.

~~~
notatoad
except that DDG has them all set up already. if you want them in firefox, you
have to set them up yourself.

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Jd
My impression is that Google also always returns wikipedia when you have
"wiki" as a search term. Only an extra two characters.

~~~
w1ntermute
That's not the same thing as the '!w' feature on DDG or the 'w' keyword
bookmark. Once you Google 'wiki <search>', you have to click on the first
link. Unless you set up an IFL search, in which case you might as well set up
a Wikipedia search.

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Jd
Good point, although I virtually always am looking for a specific article on
wikipedia and not searching the site.

~~~
w1ntermute
Which is exactly what my keyword search does. For example, if I type 'w hacker
news' into my location bar, I'm instantly redirected to
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_news>

