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Comment by mardifoufs | Hacker News Reader

This might be related to the bing API. I'm pretty sure Bing hiked their API access prices, effective may 1st 2023. Custom search is way more expensive than regular search too.

But I'd think duckduckgo wouldn't really be affected by public pricing, and that they have some sort of huge discounts and contracts that would protect them against this. If they pay anything that is, since I thought ddg generated revenue from using bing. Though Ecosia seems to have the same issue so who knows.

https://www.computerworld.com/article/3688574/microsoft-more...

Source on the price increases, seems like the API is now 3x to 10x more expensive (I used the MS docs directly but the article shows the previous rates too).

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DDG is absolutely affected by Bing price hikes. Because M$ has raised the price here, DDG has had to lower the quality of their service. This will shift a (small) portion of those DDG users to Bing (lol).

They'be been in the search game for a long time. Its time they stop relying on bing and build their own search tech instead. Or mix and match atleast.

Didn't they used to have their own search index infrastructure?

I think they only use their own crawler/index for smart search results. (maybe because those cost a LOT to source from Bing)

Only for cards/knowledge graphs

After more research, I'm almost certain that they use the syndicated bing search instead of just using the API. Meaning they earn revenue for pure search, but I'm not sure if they still have to pay for some advanced parts of the API (filtering, autocomplete, etc). There's also no way to check if the revenue share dropped, which could be make sense considering how the price hike for the API. So take my comment with a grain of salt!

Do the paid search results also include paid adverts? If not, I can understand why MSFT raised the prices so much. The initial costs were probably way too low, but they wanted to gauge market interest. After finding firm interest, raise the prices to ensure that no one will use the API to build their own search engine without adverts! The people who work on Bing must be very expensive. Not to mention hardware/network costs.

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