No, your not. But that isn't a bad thing. From your link:
"we do not expect to be wholly independent from third-parties."
That is the technical difference, search engines do expect to be, if not wholly, then at least materially independent from third-parties, they are the third parties, search providers are all about the experience.
But lets be really clear, that terminology distinction really only matters when you get behind the search bar as far as the world is concerned we're all search engines, even if, like search.com, they don't index anything, and while DDG provides tailored indexes which support key aspects of your site's experience. The differentiation is the experience in that case not where you get your data. And I fully recognize that this distinction is not important for a large chunk of the Internet [1].
For a general audience, yes, we're all search engines.
For a technical audience, no, we're not. And the distinction is whether or not you have a generalized web index or not.
For organic search they present to the end user in a nearly identical way, caveat the 'experience' benefits of one over the other.
But for other things, like "tell me all the sites on the internet that copied this article verbatim." or "give me a rundown on link authority to all inlinks to this page" those kinds of things you need both a web index, and rights to use it like that. That's a pretty objective difference in capability.
So in technical company (and I consider HN to be technical) I try to be crisp about the terminology, in non-technical company I refer to all of these offerings as search engines because it is less confusing and frankly they don't care what its called, they type in words and get results.
[1] My father in law (part of the 99%) thinks he logs into "Google" to get to the internet because Chrome defaults to Google's home page when it starts up.
"we do not expect to be wholly independent from third-parties."
That is the technical difference, search engines do expect to be, if not wholly, then at least materially independent from third-parties, they are the third parties, search providers are all about the experience.
But lets be really clear, that terminology distinction really only matters when you get behind the search bar as far as the world is concerned we're all search engines, even if, like search.com, they don't index anything, and while DDG provides tailored indexes which support key aspects of your site's experience. The differentiation is the experience in that case not where you get your data. And I fully recognize that this distinction is not important for a large chunk of the Internet [1].
For a general audience, yes, we're all search engines.
For a technical audience, no, we're not. And the distinction is whether or not you have a generalized web index or not.
For organic search they present to the end user in a nearly identical way, caveat the 'experience' benefits of one over the other.
But for other things, like "tell me all the sites on the internet that copied this article verbatim." or "give me a rundown on link authority to all inlinks to this page" those kinds of things you need both a web index, and rights to use it like that. That's a pretty objective difference in capability.
So in technical company (and I consider HN to be technical) I try to be crisp about the terminology, in non-technical company I refer to all of these offerings as search engines because it is less confusing and frankly they don't care what its called, they type in words and get results.
[1] My father in law (part of the 99%) thinks he logs into "Google" to get to the internet because Chrome defaults to Google's home page when it starts up.