I mean, doesn't microsoft have bing?

Yeah but no one uses it. I am not even sure people that are forced to use it like using it because it was productized it pretty poorly. After all who wants another google? They invested 100 Billion dollars, which is a lot of wasted money TBH.

Search indexes are hard, surely, but if you were to strip it to just a good index on the browser, made it free, kept it fresh, it cannot be 100 billion dollars to build. Then you use this DoJ decision and fight against google to not deny a free index to have equal rights on chrome you can have a massive shot at a win for a LOT less money.

> Yeah but no one uses it. I am not even sure people like using it because it was productized it pretty poorly. They invested 100 Billion dollars, which is a lot of wasted money TBH.

I mean... Duckduckgo uses bing api iirc and I use duckduckgo and many people use duckduckgo.

I also used bing once because bing used to cache websites which weren't available in wayback archive, I don't know how but It was pretty cool solution for a problem.

I hate bing too and I am kind of interested in ecosia/qwant's future as well (yes there's kagi too and good luck to kagi as well! but I am currently still staying on duckduckgo)

Duck duck go is really cool. I am almost fully rooting for them and they are my default mobile and web browser.

The small distributed team grinding it out against the goliath. They are awesome and perhaps the right example of what a path like this would look like. Maybe someone from their team can chime in on the difficulties of building a search engine that works in the face of tremendous odds.

DDG is mostly just an anonymizing proxy for Bing. Microsoft encourages it because it increases Bing's market share over Google.

I would imagine the users of DDG to be closer to a rounding error than an actual percentage of users. I'd imagine theGoog would love and hate to have 100%. They'd love it because all the data, and hate it as it would prove the monopoly. At the end of the day, the % that is not going to them probably doesn't cause theGoog to lose much sleep

It's just so wild how great Duckduckgo is & how under-rated it is.

It's available in all major browsers (Here in zen browser, it doesn't even have a default browser but rather on the start page it asks between the three options, google duckduckgo and bing but yes if you press next it starts from google but zen can even start from ddg, its not such a big deal)

Duckduckgo is super amazing. I mean they are so amazing and their duck.ai or ai actually provides concise data instead of Google's AI

DDG is leaps ahead of Google in terms of everything. I found Kagi to be pleasant too but with PPP it might make sense in Europe and America but privacy isn't/ shouldn't be the only who only pays. So DDG is great for me personally and I can't recommend it enough for most cases.

Brave/Startpage is a second but DDG is so good :)

It just works (for most cases, the only use case I use google is for uploading images to then get more images like this or use an image as a search query and I just do !gi and open images.google.com but I only use this function very rarely, bangs are amazing feature by ddg)

I use DDG myself. I just assumed that I'm not a very sophisticated user as I've never had it not serve my needs based on how other people here say it's not very good.

>I've never had it not serve my needs

Same here. It may be 'not very good' for highly specialized or complex technical questions ... but I do research across a broad range of (non-specialized) topics daily. I often need to find 2nd and 3rd points of view on a topic ... or detailed facts about singular events ... and I rarely need to go to the 2nd page. And all ad-free!

It's a remarkable education tool. A curious, explorative kid these days could easily sail WAY beyond their age group using DDG. I can only wish I'd had it.

Their recently added 'Search assistant' consistently provides a couple of CITATIONS to backup its (multi-leveled) responses (Ask for more, get more.) I've seen nothing like it elsewhere. It is even quite good at diggin up useful ... and working ... example code for some languages. Also with citations.

DDG is just an anonymizing front-end for Bing. Your DDG results are Bing results.

Then the anonimization is a key component of their goodness. When I compare searches between Bing and DDG I find the DDG ones superior every time.

All these companies have the exact same business model as Google (advertising) and have the same mismatched incentives: good search results are not something they want.

Google Search sucks not because Google is incapable of filtering out spam and SEO slop (though they very much love that people believe they can't), but that spam/slop makes the ads on the SERP page more enticing, and some of the spam itself includes Google Ads/analytics and benefits them there too.

There is no incentive for these companies to build a good search engine by themselves to begin with, let alone provide data to allow others to build one.

I was on the Goog forums for years (before they even fucking ruined the FORMAT of the forums, possibly to 'be more mobile friendly') and it was people absolutely (justifiably) screaming at the product people

No, the customer isn't 'always' right, but these guys like to get big and once big, fuck you, we don't have to listen to you, we're big; what are you going to do, leave?

I learned on here that this has been happening to a degree with maps. Several big companies have been cooperating to improve open street map data, a rare example of a beneficial commons. This is probably some unique accident of incentives and timing and history but maybe it could happen in other domains.

They will prefer to band up with Google, and rip us off.