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Comment by _qulr | Hacker News Reader

IMO the biggest issue with DDG is that you can't really advertise specifically on DDG.

Most people don't realize this, but DDG doesn't sell their own advertising, they use Microsoft's advertising network! This just seems bizarre to me that they're outsourcing the whole reason they're supposed to be independent of the other search engines.

I tried signing up for Microsoft's network, but it was a bad user interface (typical MS), very confusing, and I couldn't really figure out how to specifically target DDG and only DDG. I just gave up.

DDG needs to bring advertising in-house, or I don't see why they have a reason to exist. They're almost a subsidiary of MS at this point.

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Since DDG also sources their organic results from Bing, I wouldn't be surprised if there was also a contractual obligation that required DDG to use Bing ads to reduce the cost they pay for the search results.

Over the last few months I have been working on an alternative search engine. Maybe naively, I thought the most difficult part was going to be to convince people to use it, but the real challenge if figuring out a way to monetize the service in a way that maintains privacy and respects users. The more I go down this path, the more I realize the next big search engine will be one that provides better results AND comes up with a better way for monetization.

I wrote a little about it here [0] if anyone is interested.

[0] https://coil.com/p/runnaroo/Privacy-and-Search-Engine-Moneti...

DDG is probably doing a revenue share with Bing. Every ad that’s clicked a % goes to DDG and MS.

Also interesting is that the Bing API TOS [0] has the below line that prevents users from using any other display advertising not provided by Microsoft:

"Display advertising that is not provided by Microsoft on any page that displays any part of a response."

DDG is big enough that they are probably on a completely separate agreement than the standard TOS though.

[0] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cognitive-services/bi...

I don't know what product or service you're advertising, but Google has really dropped the ball the last couple of years in terms of ROI. Most get far better results with social media these days.

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