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 1/1000th 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 /almost/ 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's search results good enough. I rarely go to Google, and only when DDG fails me.<p>d) If DDG can't target advertising as well as Google, they'll still have enough revenue to survive at their current level of quality. Their CPM is likely lower than Google's with less data and optimization, but I'd guess at worst 2x lower, not 1000x lower.<p>I'm glad they're doing well. On paper, it seems like a sound business model, and it's a heck of a lot more customer-friendly.<p>Curiously, I'd say 90% of the time I use Google is for math. If I'm typing a complex math expression (especially with units), Google tends to do much better than DDG.