On: DuckDuckGo is blowing up

[white_devil]

Now that you have investors, they'll expect you to multiply DDG's worth. So how do you make money with it?

[webwright → white_devil]

Making money with a search engine is a solved problem. Making a search engine worth switching to is not-- that's what they are (and should be) focused on. I'd wager their investors are telling them the same thing.

[dfc → webwright]

This was news to me. What is the solution to making money as a privacy preserving search engine?

[ef4 → dfc]

You can still make money off of targeted ads. The difference is you can only target the current query.

I also think DuckDuckGo hands out affiliate links to places like Amazon.

[marshray → white_devil]

Screw that! Just keep giving me the service I love for free!

Sorry, I know you need to make a living. :-) Just don't try to do it by leveraging my identity or trying my patience, please?

[aidos → white_devil]

There are sponsored links - like on Google.

[mike-cardwell → aidos]

Also, he uses affiliate programs. So if a link in the search results goes to Amazon for example, he'll add his affiliate code to the link.

[lusr → mike-cardwell]

Any idea why Google doesn't do that? I'm guessing it's against the terms and conditions? In which case I have to wonder why DDG can do it.

[mike-cardwell → lusr]

I'm guessing it's not against the T&C's, otherwise Amazon would have closed his affiliate account by now. They're quite good at that.

Google probably doesn't see the point. I'm sure there's something in the T&C's that would allow Amazon to close an affiliate account for any reason they want to. If they still get the same amount of traffic from Google either way, they'd close it.