What is the business model for DuckDuckGo? (2017)
DuckDuckGo has 50-100 employees, according to CrunchBase, while Google has over 100,000 employees. The exact numbers are irrelevant, but Google has around three orders of magnitude more employees than DDG.<p>a) DDG needs about 1&#x2F;1000th the revenue of Google to survive at its current scale.<p>b) Software quality does not scale linearly with manpower. A 50-100 person team can do &#x2F;almost&#x2F; as well as a 10,000 person team in the same domain. You spend a lot to go from 90% to 99% or 99% to 99.9%.<p>c) Unsurprisingly, I find DDG&#x27;s search results good enough. I rarely go to Google, and only when DDG fails me.<p>d) If DDG can&#x27;t target advertising as well as Google, they&#x27;ll still have enough revenue to survive at their current level of quality. Their CPM is likely lower than Google&#x27;s with less data and optimization, but I&#x27;d guess at worst 2x lower, not 1000x lower.<p>I&#x27;m glad they&#x27;re doing well. On paper, it seems like a sound business model, and it&#x27;s a heck of a lot more customer-friendly.<p>Curiously, I&#x27;d say 90% of the time I use Google is for math. If I&#x27;m typing a complex math expression (especially with units), Google tends to do much better than DDG.