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Comment by cpg | Hacker News Reader

I have been a happy DDG user for more than two years and it's one of the best things I have done in a while. It works well, and it's great for productivity. So, that Google does not take it extra easy on them is not surprising. However, as Google matures, they will realize they need an AMD to their Intel. Something that poses little business threat, yet diffuses the antitrust threat. ... Watch.

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I set DDG as my default search in Firefox; the results were abysmal. It felt like being transported back to altavista.digital.com, wading through middling irrelevant links searching for info. I got fed up with having to put !g into every query to get a good result, I ended up switching to DuckDuckGoog instead (and this is my current search provider).

This http://duckduckgo.com/feedback.html is a good place to place intelligent, constructive feedback.

The web community (that is, all of us) really, really needs an alternative to Google. I don't care whether you love or hate them. We desperately need an alternative.

MS spent gazillions of dollars trying to do it with Bing and isn't close yet. Google is simply the best service out there by a very wide margin. When people close the gap, there will be a viable alternative. There's no cosmic law that says there needs to be an alternative to product X.

I have no access to the internal budgets of Microsoft so I can't really comment intelligently. I am a cross-platform smartphone developer so I use wp7, wp8 as well as Google APIs daily in order to do my work and bing doesn't seem so bad for consumer oriented searches. YMMV. For the queries I execute, I agree their results are subpar.

But I feel compelled to respond. If there is no alternative to Google for something as important as indexing the output of human knowledge production... we are in serious trouble. The library of Alexandria burned and we still have no idea why [0].

Google is interested in one thing, getting you to look at ads. In their defense, well-targeted ads (++efficiency!). However when given the opportunity they have exploited their leadership position for every commercial advantage and recently to the detriment of search (e.g., I do not care to see what a bunch of "thought leaders" in google+ have to say on the topic I'm searching for). Their support for "Do Not Track" is grudging at best. [1]

Their business model is approaching that of a virus infecting a host. They enter an external market and utilize their near monopoly in web search/advertising to drive the value proposition for competitors to near-zero. And that gives me pause. It is like Starbucks opening in every local branch of your public library.

So, I support DDG and I give them feedback on my own time in the hopes they aren't also inherently out to screw me in the end. Also because I do believe (and this is an assumption on my part) that a "cosmic" -- well that may be an overreach -- law is involved. Search is not a natural monopoly [2].

[0] http://www.economicshelp.org/dictionary/n/natural-monopoly.h... [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Google#Do_Not_Trac... [2] http://www.economicshelp.org/dictionary/n/natural-monopoly.h...

"Need" implies that it requires state intervention on Google's products/services; that somehow Google's position as the market leader in... whatever it is exactly we care about (search, I guess) is a very bad thing.

Except that market forces are what they are, and there is no compelling reason to compare Google who has tons of backups and with many competing services (though most are bad) to the Library of Alexandria which had a very concrete single point of failure - which is the entire problem the Internet was developed to solve.

Google having competitors is good for all of us. But it doesn't "need" one, as if we must forcibly install a competitor in... well, whatever area you think they "need" a competitor in (Google services quite a wide range of areas).

>Their business model is approaching that of a virus infecting a host. They enter an external market and utilize their near monopoly in web search/advertising to drive the value proposition for competitors to near-zero. And that gives me pause. It is like Starbucks opening in every local branch of your public library.

Google horizontally integrates by buying companies and reforming them into their own services.

And Starbucks' share price has been significantly reduced from its high earlier this year. (And recovered after losing 50% of its market share by closing a lot of its unprofitable branches some years ago.)

It's a self-correcting problem.

I never stated I advocate state intervention. I said search is not a natural monopoly and as a result we as a market need viable competitors. As the perceived cost to us for both is zero, those competitors need "charitable" use to improve because the product is the activity. You can only improve human search by analyzing human searches. One might argue I suppose that there is enough capital to throw at the problem (say, pay me to use ddg until it catches up or pay Google to provide data), but I question whether that can be the case due to the network effects of the integrations you mention.

The Internet was not designed to provide highly-available redundant backups of data. It was designed to route packets across disparate peer networks in a manner to minimize congestion. Is there an ietf rfc you have in mind that illustrates your assertion? [0]

I do not follow; what does fluctuations in Starbuck's stock price have to do with the discussion? It was used as an example of a brand latching on to a public resource, libraries, in the hopes of becoming indistinguishable from the activity, namely reading.

[0] http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1958

Instead of supporting yet another closed engine and hoping that they -or whoever happens to control it in the future- won't screw you, you could do what I did for a while, and run an instance of Yacy[1] on your own computer or VPS.

[1]: http://yacy.net/en/index.html

DDG have queries that start out unadorned, then get repeated with !g. They don't need me to fill out forms.

I agree that having strong competition to Google is necessary. But I found DDG painful to the point of becoming a little bitter.

Bing already occupies that position.

When Google testifies before Congress, they tend to mention "Bing and Blekko" or "Bing and DuckDuckGo". Since Bing is losing a lot of money every quarter, and is owned by a pretty big company (M$), it's useful to have smaller, newer competitors around.

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