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Comment by jimbokun | Hacker News Reader

"That's because cuil was building a search engine from scratch rather than relying on bing's/yahoo's index to do the underlying scoring."

I've heard this in other discussions of DuckDuckGo here, and I don't understand why bing/yahoo allow a potential competitor free access to data that is so important to their search businesses. What's in it for Yahoo/Microsoft? Or is DDG paying for the privilege?

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It's probably the same reason google allows free app engine accounts. If someone builds something cool, it's easy to integrate upon acquisition.

At the moment DDG is effectively a customer, not a competitor. If DDG ever became large enough to show up on Bing's radar (Bing currently has 600x as much traffic), you can bet that the terms would change.

As far as I know, DDG isn't paying for access. But I might be wrong about that. Maybe they are they paying for Bing, but not Yahoo?

Yahoo have recently announced that they will soon be charging for Boss.

http://developer.yahoo.net/blog/archives/2010/08/api_updates...

"We are exploring a potential fee-based structure as well as ad-revenue models that will enable BOSS developers to monetize their offerings. When we roll out these changes, BOSS will no longer be a free service to developers."

Yahoo's search api is about to go premium. It's been free to date, but they have always said they'll start charging for it at some point.

They can be the long tail of search engines, an army of Google beaters that are used by people that would never consider using Yahoo search.

I don't think the ordering of the results is Google's competitive advantage anymore it's branding and habit.

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