> Each of [Bing’s search partners] have to show bing ads, forward the users' IPs as per Bing's terms of service (to fight ad fraud etc).
But DuckDuckGo says:
> [W]e never share any personal information with any of our partners. The way it works is when we call a partner for information, it is proxied through our servers so it stays completely anonymous. That is, any call to a partner looks to the partner as it is from us and not the user itself, and no user personal information is passed in that process (e.g. their IP address). That way we can build our search result pages using these 100s of partner sources, while still keeping them completely anonymous to you.
The ToS you are referring to is for companies without custom deals in place.
You can read DuckDuckGo's privacy policy here: https://duckduckgo.com/privacy
There isn't going to be, because it's really hard and expensive to do that. I don't see how any startup could even begin to compete with their own search engine.
The barrier to entry is extremely high: Bing probably would not have survived long enough to be profitable if it had been a startup. Microsoft put a lot of money into building it.
Subscriptions and micropayments would not be a solution for DDG because too few people would be willing to pay. Ad revenue is the only model that has sustained search engines in the long term.
I think you're absolutely right that it's not trivial, but it isn't a completely unsolvable problem only addressable by the major spyware corporations like Facebook, Google, etc. I think you could build a decent search engine in about 6-18 months if all living expenses were paid and you could just lock yourself into your apartment with no distractions, with maybe a team of 1-3 other extremely talented engineers.
* DuckDuckGo could be saying "We have a client from Kyrgyzstan, please give us an ad". Bing could be saying: Here is the heading, the body, and the URL. DDG could be dumping that in the page. Your privacy is not compromised.
* DuckDuckGo could be saying "We have a client from Kyrgyzstan and a client from Brazil and a client from Texas searching for 'plastic sponge bathtub' or 'green sponge bathtub' or 'green sponge beach'" in response to a search for "green sponge beach" from a Brazilian. Bing could be responding with several answers. DuckDuckGo would then send the relevant answer to the client.
* If you click on an ad, you have no privacy, end of story.
It's the only EU-based search engine with its own indexing engine ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qwant )
I don't care if it's EU or not, but is the index real or kind of half-fake? (like "yes, we have an index, but it's 10MBs big...")
I started using Qwant ~2 months ago and it isn't bad: the snippets that are shown in the search results often don't contain the search terms that I used but the links were so far good - but I did mostly lookups for e.g. functions and other reference data - the few times that I challenged it with exact searches its results were similar to the ones of Google, meaning that it didn't return the websites that contained such exact sequences of characters.
I agree - I admit of having been surprised the first time that it returned "nothing" but in the end I did like the feeling of knowing that it did search what I wanted to search.
By searching some random words like "when to buy fruitcakes" (without double quotes) I get almost the same listing in Qwant as in Bing. The results are a bit too similar... .
Duckduckgo isn't perfect but they're better than google. If I knew of something better than duckduckgo, I'd use that instead. But I'm not going to let perfect be the enemy of good.
I don't know a great deal about their infrastructure and would love to learn more about it.
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/duckduckgo-anonymous-privacy
IIUC, they have built their own search, but use Bing(among others) for paid ads.
If this is the case, it seems that it’s the business model that needs innovation and not the search engine itself.
I tried that, and did not see 207.* anywhere on the page. It displayed my IP address above the results list, and then a list of reasonable results for that query, without any IP addresses listed in any of the descriptions.
https://i.imgur.com/HbhvISk.png
This means DuckDuckGo uses Bing for its results. But it doesn't mean DuckDuckGo is forwarding your IP to Bing.
However I think we need to start asking deeper questions - why is it that concentration is so prevalent in the software industry?
Software is often said to have "natural" monopoly characteristics, but are those characteristics really a product of "nature" in the way that say the laws of physics are, or are they a product of IP laws and the regulatory choices made by the government?
Network effects purely because once you have enough mass of people on board, you can easily attract more people and it is easy enough to distinguish yourself from your competitors that it deters people from switching and/or even being able to make a comparison.
Second you can’t easily steal IP. Anker making a next generation charger will have to face copycats who went to their OEM and were sold the design or the product itself from the backdoor. It’s simply difficult to keep things under wraps when it has a physical + human component. Not so easy in software. To substitute Instagram you’ll probably [0] have to write everything from scratch. Computers when configured correctly will not exactly sell your work from the back door.
[0] I mean source code is still stolen but it’s still marginally harder to use source code than just selling the stolen designs. Plus stealing source code works only once because the victim will then clamp down harder and then continue to innovate it’s way out of the mess.
Seems doubtful since that would be contrary to DDG's main marketing message and their reason for even existing.
It's not mentioned on their site, or their wikipedia entry, or anywhere else I could find, and the results were different when I tried a few searches in them both just now.
Are they "Using Bing" in the same sense they "Use Wikipedia" to put info boxes on the results page sometimes?
> it would be wrong to say "Google does similar things"
This does not follow.
It also isn't what I was suggesting, but it would surprise me if Google didn't look at what Bing and Yahoo were doing (and DDG).
As of October 2019, Yahoo! Search is once again “powered by Bing”[2].
To me, results are as crap as Bing's.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/duckduckgo/comments/6uaibg/comment/...
SO and the other 400 sources are only used for instant boxes and other widgets. The real organic search results are all from Bing.
> In fact, DuckDuckGo gets its results from over four hundred sources. These include hundreds of vertical sources delivering niche Instant Answers, DuckDuckBot (our crawler) and crowd-sourced sites (like Wikipedia, stored in our answer indexes). We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we also source from a variety of partners, including Verizon Media (formerly Yahoo) and Bing.
I'm not sure where you're getting
> The real organic search results are all from Bing.
That paragraph __DOES NOT__ say that
> more traditional links in the search results
It's super obvious to me what that refers to - the actual search results. The rest is just fluff.
> In fact, DuckDuckGo gets its results from over four hundred sources. These include hundreds of vertical sources delivering niche Instant Answers, DuckDuckBot (our crawler) and crowd-sourced sites (like Wikipedia, stored in our answer indexes). We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we also source from a variety of partners, including Verizon Media (formerly Yahoo) and Bing.
https://help.duckduckgo.com/results/sources/
The results are very similar but not identical to using yahoo or bing.
I like DuckDuckGo. But unless they build their own search - I think the fundamental problem has not been tackled. There is no good, independent, private search alternative.
[Edit] I am not trying to single out DDG. There are a few replies that either demand for proof (rightfully) or suggest Bing is used only sometimes. I do not have conclusive proof, but have worked on search. Here's a couple of things for the curious:
1. Try to run this test: If you query "what is my ip" in duckduckgo (DDG), or any of the other ones I mentioned, you will notice in the description of one of the top results this IP: 207.46.13.147. It's a BingBot IP [0]. It's a good enough test to spot where results are coming from.
2. Open two browser windows side by side with DDG and Bing. Turn on results for the country you are in in DDG. Look attentively. Try image search.
It is clear that DDG does some re-ranking based on its own, but it's very often the same results.
[0] https://whatismyipaddress.com/ip/207.46.13.147