I couldn't find it anywhere in their data statement, nor in their about page or terms and conditions, where the results were coming from. Finally at the bottom of the SERP there's the indication that results come from Microsoft (Bing). However, all links to Bing seem to happen in the backend, including linking to images. Would like to know how much data they share with Bing, but so far as it's visible from the client side it looks pretty solid. And they have podcast search, which is cute.
This situation almost screams for web indexing as a service. Would love to see some search engine innovation, especially advanced curation, classification, archival and filtering(!) abilities.
Brave say they have their own index actually, but also sometimes use other providers (maybe for when their own index didn't return enough results?). https://brave.com/brave-search-beta/
And now let's see, what will happen when in a faraway future, some digital archaeologist explores, whether the early internet really was intended for porn or not...
Google makes like 50$ per month from you and Facebook makes 30$ per month (or something in this ballpark), things are way beyond what most people are willing to pay.
30$/user/year seems to be accurate. Facebook reported 86 billion USD for 2020 [1] and 2.89 billion MAU [2]. When computing the ratio, the geek inside me feels particularly satisfied to reduce billion from the numerator and denominator. :)
oh wait, thats 2.8b mau but most of them are worth nothing, look at west europe and north america, and only subset of them, its like 200 million people that have to pay
i think the problem is that the people that will pay a cent are the people they are making 40$ per month from, and the rest of the MAUs are probably almost worthless
Like many people out there I have never clicked on an ad and I definitely never closed a purchase by following an ad link. I never allowed for tighter integration, I avoid other Google services (Gmail, Maps, Youtube) other than Search itself.
Users like me are a burden on google's servers. On average if I was charged 20$ a month for anonomised technical search services then I am fairly confident that they would be making more money than if I just ad-block everything like I currently do.
> On average if I was charged 20$ a month for anonomised technical search services then I am fairly confident that they would be making more money than if I just ad-block everything like I currently do.
You should check out Gigablast (https://www.gigablast.com/). I came across their site yesterday, as one of a very few search engines who maintain their own index of the internet rather than relying on Google or Bing. It's delightfully antique, and surprisingly good for all but the most arcane searches.
Why do you say that? The revenue of Facebook is public (86B in 2020). Is a lot of it not from users, or is the figure incorrect, or do they have many more users than they say they have?
Interestingly, this approach seems to be gaining more traction in Germany specifically. One of the larger newspapers, Die Zeit, applies it for the free tier of its website. There’s a big annoying modal when you go to zeit.de if you want to see that approach in practice. Hilariously the choice I make in that modal never seems to stick. Maybe there’s a separate GDPR-compliant toggle somewhere to allow them to track that I want to be tracked ha!
> (1) I agree that Nona Search Technologies GmbH ("Chronoto") may use my e-mail address for advertising Chronoto, including advertising in connection with the sale (e.g. information on the value of the watch and the sales process), the purchase (e.g. interesting offers of watches) and ownership (e.g. offers of insurance and financing, as well as maintenance and repair).
So assuming I want to build a car search website where I get payed via referrals from let's say a predefined dozen of dealers, I could subscribe to this offering from Nona Search Technologies GmbH where it would crawl their sites and give me their new offerings in a predefined format?
I would prefer a netflix model run by the gov. You pay 10 Euro a month when having an internet connection. This is distributed based on your activity. Sites you use often are being paid more to run their infra. At the same time those sites are not allowed to run ads or affiliate crap. Also profits should be capped and taxed with 99% above a threshold. \
Seems like most new search engines are “bing + some other sources.” Just wondering, does Bing charge for this use?
Personally, in the past month I’ve noticed a significant degradation of results from DDG, and since I don’t know what’s going on I just blame Bing. Because of that, each time we have posts about alternative engines I first check to see if they’re not using Bing. But they all are!
Regardless, they return far better search results for queries in German than Google does. For example, if you look for something about a changing legislation in the Bundestag, they will have articles published in the past 30 minutes, where as Google won't surface the same articles for a few weeks.
There's only one chance to make a lasting impression as an aspiring Google competitor and there isn't a single one that even made it into my bookmarks. I understand there's enough love for DDG on HN but life is too short for mediocre horizontal search results.
DDG is now even with Google imo. Used to be different for sure. But nowadays, it's a back and forth.
For a lot of people DDG is strictly better: You live anywhere that is not the US and therefore have to deal with a thing called "locality". Sometimes you want search results in language X, sometimes for your location, sometimes you need the "normal" results for Americans.
Google decides all that for you. Badly. There is no setting except - your know, logging into some Google account and finding some setting somewhere for it.
My results are the same or better than Google in DDG as far as I can tell. I haven't missed Google a bit since I switched. So, either the difference for the average user is minimal or there isn't a difference.
It’s a frequent complaint. I wonder if some people just use search differently and the lack of tracking makes it work worse for them on DDG? I’m in the same boat as you (except for their horrible decision to just ignore what you search and show you almost random results when they don’t get enough/any hits) and rarely ever use !g.
Have you considered that maybe you're just used to Google? There is a learning curve to using a new search engine. The way they answer your queries depends on how you ask.
But at the end, it's about what you care about. Is life too short to have principles?
First thought as a German, why? Second thought, why not? Google killed all others because it was much better. I still use Google because DDG does not work for me, but there might be a market for a German search engine on top of Bing, now that the technology gap isn't as large as it was 20y ago. The benefit of being better for Germans (by whatever definition) could compensate the technology gap.
I wonder what would be better? having search engines able to deal with different languages or having different search engines for every possible language, Don't see the point for the latter to be honest, having an universal language makes more sense to me.
Regardless of whether you serve them through the same search box, from a practical standpoint, I think you'd want basically a separate back-end for each language. Stuff like relative term importance, word extraction, ranking, they all benefit from being kept separately.
it looks like a lot, but a typical user will only use a handful of them. and having each tailored to a language or region is better than a universal search engine.
First we do search. After retrieval comes question answering based on the retrieved snippets. Then comes multi-hop question answering with the need to correlate information between multiple sources. Just watched a video showing how it can be done https://youtu.be/-ethT5YDVmo?t=1256
Depends on whether you were taught the old or new rules, and whether you remember them correctly.
The old rules said you only write the 3 same consonants only if they are followed by another consonant. Schiffahrt with 2 f is correct under the old rules, because the f is not followed by another consonant. But it would be Schifffracht (ship cargo) with 3 f because of the last f being followed by a consonant. Or Hellila (light purple) with only 2 l in the middle instead of three (the word is a compound of hell and lila).
The new "simplified" rules from 1996 say you always write the 3 same consonants or vowels. Alternatively you can use a hyphen. Schifffahrt with 3 f is correct under the new rules. Schiff-Fahrt is as well. Schifffracht or Schiff-Fracht. Helllila or Hell-Lila.
While the rules are taught (and following the rules is part of the grade you will get), they are now lawfully binding in German-speaking countries, and indeed there are plenty of people, especially those who went to elementary school before 1996, and even publications that use the old rules still.
I was in school in the middle of it all. I was taught the old rules in elementary school but the new rules technically came into effect while I was in mid/high school. We were given a short introduction to the changes, and were allowed to use whatever rules we wanted. Some teachers would mark you down for spelling mistakes if you mixed new and old, tho.
Wikipedia claims that Donaudampfschiffahrtsgesellschaft is the proper name of a company that only existed until 1991, so the new rules that were introduced in 1996 do not apply. The company never changed its name to the new spelling, so the old spelling should be used to refer to the historical company. The reasoning makes sense to me.
If you're referring to that company specifically, yes, their spelling would not have changed, as it is an Eigenname. The actual name was Erste Donaudampfschiffahrtsgesellschaft (Erste = first). However there were probably a bunch of companies operating steam ships on the danube, which can be reasonably called Donauschifffahrtsgesellschaften ;)
Good quality results on English search, but it logs IP address etc and does not anonymizes users. So I wll stick to DDG till the fix it. Otherwise great initial effort.
Excrept fron ther privacy policy -
"Such information may include details of the User’s visit, information about the User’s computer, including IP (Internet Protocol) address, operating system and browser type, the User’s location, and usage information. An individual User will not be identified from or by this information and NONA is entitled to copy, distribute or otherwise use such information without limitation".
Are you talking about Nona? We don't log any IP addresses.
You might want to put the quote in context: The passage is from the area of "email and marketing" or "social media", we are obliged to the passage if we maintain a presence there - so in the case our Instagram accounts for example.
But thanks, we might need to edit the text to make it clearer.
I dunno, there is something obviously wrong with this engine.
When I search for "saashub", saashub.com isn't on the first page. And that's a website that's been online since 2014 and has more than one million page-views a month... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
Bing doesn't show that website either. Some websites are so eager to block spam that they block any automated traffic with the sole exception of Google's crawler.
How can this be a privacy-respecting search engine if it requires me to provide payment details for the ad-free version?
On top of that, the ad-free version requires a login and enables them to tie my search queries to my account.
Seems to respect privacy. At least it only includes one external js resource, and doesn't leave cookies. And while the interface is in German, it does find results in various languages.
Great effort.
As a individual developer, How does using Bing results work? Can I signup for their search engine API and modify them based on my secret sauce, without raking up 100$+ bill every month?
The bill will be based on your usage. For Bing API it is $7 per 1,000 queries for full results (news/video/images). So just raw results without any other effort will cost you about $7/mo assuming you do 30 queries/day.
I love that people keep making alternatives, but I can't shake the feeling that whatever displaces search engines won't be recognizable as a search engine.
A search engine could replace a another search engine, but it’d need a better take than just being German. Google wasn’t the first search engine after all.
