Comment by zaidf | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zaidf | Hacker News Reader

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This got me thinking...is it possible for Microsoft to secretly buy out DDG and leave them the fuck alone except where they need help(ie. access to Bing index)?

For all the money the Bing unit keeps pouring, I feel buying DDG and leaving them the heck alone can be a reasonable long-term bet with relatively little risk.

The challenge would be to keep the founders/team motivated. They could spin it off as a completely different company on IPO track and give significant equity. But then what if Google wants to buy them out? And of course, the Bing team may have a problem with MSFT creating internal competition though that may just push em to do better.

More likely if DuckDuckGo gets in an acquisition bidding war, I put my money on Gabe passing acquisition for raising a huge funding round that lets him take some money off the table.

With all the flaws(enough that I don't use it), it remains a rare search engine start-up that has its heart in the right place: to actually serve consumers versus build some technology or team and get acquired(looking at you, Powerset).

I think you're getting ahead of yourself here. DDG has 0.1% of all search traffic ( 30m out of 23b queries per month ). They get all of their 'relevancy' from bing, and blekko. The reason you like them is because they clean up these results, provide peripheral add-ons like user privacy, no ads, easier syntax for power users, and one-boxes which function more as a knowledge-base than a search engine. They don't crawl/index the web. or if they do, we haven't heard anything about it, or seen any different relevancy rankings from the BOSS api. So they are really a new face to already extant search engines.

You mention a 'bidding war'. Who would buy them? Any 'features' they provide can be copied by msft/google if they feel threatened. They don't have their own backend search technology so partners who might want to do search with them, ask.com, search.com, etc. have no reason to work with them as opposed to the BOSS api themselves or even Bing. I'm just as excited as you are about innovation in search and competitors to google, but DDG needs to be re-architected on the back-end before these sorts of pronouncements make sense.

yep, i completely agree. DDG is built off Bing's platform, so they're screwed if MSFT ever made their index private. They also don't got a strong brand outside of hackers who've heard of them.

I must admit they do a good job in the PR area of making themselves seem big and sexy. But they're really not innovating search, or providing any thick value in improving search. At least Blekko was trying to create a better algorithm.

"At least Blekko was trying to create a better algorithm."

Why the past-tense? Blekko is still alive and kicking. (And I hope they find success, because they're doing amazing technical work. From a purely technical perspective, they deserve ten times the press that DDG is getting.)

I like your defense of Blekko. I am often puzzled why blekko is talked off so little, compared to DDG, on Hacker News. Nothing against DDG, but blekko is the only new entrant trying to fight Google heads on. As it does its own crawling, and Skrenta believed that search can be improved when he started (apparent from his blog posts).

But I think, the mistake Blekko did perhaps was being too close to a Google kind of (i.e. traditional) search engine. On this path, it may take them atleast another 3 years, before people start taking them seriously. It will be a hard and grueling road.

But the thing, I like about them, is that they did not make the mistake of cuil, and are being conservative in making promises.

Overall, I suspect, they may be feeling a bit out of sorts, as when they started out (2007) the social network thing was still in infancy. And now people are talking about facebook coming into search and so on, which if it happens, may be a totally different approach to search, than perhaps what blekko did, which was trying to emulate and out-do Google.

Yeah, I was thinking of Cuil, haha.. and you're right, they deserve much more press. It's like people here want to create a self fulfilling prophecy by saying DDG should be acquired..

Yeah I'm pretty excited when DDG gets to a point where they can start hiring the engineers to build a crawler/indexer, that way they can really start to kickass.

As an aside, I still use blekko everyday, and they obliterate google and bing in certain intent queries. If you search for some intent query in these categories: travel, jobs, real estate, cars, finance, legal, medical, services, and merchandise sales AND one of their blekko/user curated slashtags fires/autofires, blekko destroys. ( eg. cure for headaches )

I've used both Blekko and DDG when trying to look for some reviews of laptops, and Blekko was much better than DDG and even Google. I went back to using Google all the time now, but I'm surprised how DDG got all this attention and Blekko gets none, when I think Blekko is better than DDG, at least relevancy wise.

DDG has its own crawler that suppliments and cleans the main search results.

http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/07/google-web-spam....

DuckDuckBot

http://duckduckgo.com/duckduckbot.html

Here is something ironic. I bet you many of DDG's users are hackers who use it for privacy reasons. The same hackers who rely on Google Analytics in their own websites. If DuckDuckGo grows to become more than a niche search engine, the same hackers who use it will have to reinvent Analytics somehow. This is reason #1 why DDG will stay small. Reason #2 is that if necessary, a DuckDuckGoogle can be created in an afternoon's worth of effort in Mountain View.

Reason #2 is that if necessary, a DuckDuckGoogle can be created in an afternoon's worth of effort in Mountain View.

I can't tell how serious you are with that statement.

I don't understand your line of reasoning. Yes, Google Analytics is useful, and we would have to replace it if Google the company went out of business or discontinued it, but why is that going to motivate people to use Google the search engine?

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