"It’s actually a big myth that search engines need to track your personal search history to make money or deliver quality search results" - DuckDuckGo's CEO explains how it’s become profitable without gathering user data
https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-revenue-generation-model-for-DuckDuckGo/answer/Gabriel-Weinberg
@thomas
I'm using DDG for about one year now, both for personal use (including scientific stuff) and professional use (software developer), in french and english, and it works quite well. I tried other search engines that didn't work well (yahoo and bing), but DDG fits my needs. Not saying it's better or equal to google, but I wouldn't say there is a major gap between them.
However, I'm still unhappy because it's centralized and relies on advertisement.
@peter
@peter
Good article, I believe same is true for general advertisement on webpages. News sites could just sell their slots based on article topic, get a advertisement image and a target url from the company who buys the slot and add it to the webpage. No tracking and probably enough to pay the bills for the online presence. Why they don't do it like that? Same reason as for Google: with tracking you earn more, it is just the typical capitalistic thinking of increasing your revenue.
@peter
> need to track your personal search history to make money
Of course it doesn't. But it does when you want to make A LOT OF money. 🤣 🤣
@peter "deliver quality search results" => You can actually see how good this works for DDG. Not. 🤦♂️
Googles search results are so much better, especially regarding technical searches and disambiguation of words.
DDG is a "nice try" and I really would like to see I getting better, but still the quality of DDG and Google is very different outside of "mainstream searches".