The US would not have put a man on the moon if it wasn't for the Soviet Union trying to do the same. Not having credible competition is bad from a purely professional point of view because you need someone to spur you on.
Since about 2003-2004 search has not really been a real competition in the west. Google has had an unhealthy dominance. I have worked for three search engine companies (Fast, Yahoo and Google) and I can remember how inspiring the early days were when there was half a dozen search engines to compete against.
I particularly enjoyed trying to figure out how the competition did things. At the time you had narrow problems people worked on that perhaps only a dozen other people in the world cared deeply about. Published research hadn't always caught up with what was happening so you spent some amount of time trying to read between the lines and measure things to figure out what the competition was up to.
One of my fondest memories is a lunch I had with Jeff Dean when I slid a napkin over the table with a graph on it. He took one look at it, smiled and said "did you figure it out?". I said "no, did you?". And he said "I have no idea".
Today search just exists and I no longer give a shit about it. It doesn't strike me as fun anymore. Because there is no real competition. I'm pretty sure that at least the engineers at Google would soil themselves with joy if they got a real competitor.
I know no one who consciously uses it to do anything other than my mother who uses it search for Google.
If none of the other default integrations exist it'd be dead on it's arse.
From what I've heard their video search is superior.
> Although why anybody has to actively /search/ for porn is beyond me.
Specific tastes?
Plus Bing has nice background images (I use it as my homepage).
I like DDG, and use it, but it's mostly a pretty front end on a now-deprecated Bing API. If Bing shut down, DDG wouldn't be far behind.
I've never seen a DDG crawler in any of my logs, though I've seen plenty of Google and Bing (and others). DDG does some nice instant answer and bang stuff, but the actual deep search results are all Bing (and maybe Yandex?)
The DDG crawler is not used for organic results, only for stuff like the widgets. All organic results are from Bing and Yahoo (and possibly Yandex).
sort of like google giving money to wikipedia, I suspect they do infact collect information on ddg searches and can aggregate it and make something useful from the information. in fact, they can probably infer that ddgs initial response was poor and determine their weaknesses etc
Apple was about to go under and Microsoft saved it in order to have a competitor.
https://www.mac-history.net/apple-history-tv/2008-07-19/macw...
That seems so strange. I cant think of any other times that a business has given charity to a direct competitor like this.