DuckDuckGo, Google, and Android choice screens

Re:DuckDuckGo, Google, and Android choice screens by ocdtrekkie on Monday June 08, 2020 @12:53PM (#23458263)

My guess is the companies DDG partners with (I believe Yandex and a couple others, in addition to Bing) need the revenue from such a deal, and probably consider the enemy of their enemy their friend. Google having a search monopoly hurts all search engines that aren't Google. So any search engine that cuts into Google's share is helpful to all of them.

I imagine Microsoft and friends are also still getting some idea what queries people making on DDG, if those queries are being forwarded to them to get results. Not user-correlated, and hence, nowhere near as valuable as if someone searched on Bing while signed into their Microsoft account. But it's probably got some general value to them on search behavior.

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Re:DuckDuckGo, Google, and Android choice screens by shadowgovt on Monday June 08, 2020 @02:12PM (#23459072)

Well, not user-correlated via traditional means. DDG is proxying user queries over to MS, but unless they're taking steps to actively fuzz the queries, there's all kinds of secondary signal MS could possibly be sampling out by correlating queries across time (especially since DDG also vends Microsoft-provided ads in the sidebar; it's unclear what signals MS is receiving about a user's session from DDG via server-to-server communication, or how MS might correlate that data. If MS vends an ad and the user clicks through, and MS gets signal that the user clicked on the ad from DDG, MS can correlate that the user who saw ad Y did search X).

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