Why is your comment the #1 comment? I mean, I count 3, count them, 3 unsubstantiated claims:
1. Does anyone care about DDG anyway? I think it's safe to say, yes, there are some who do. I for one.
2. The problem DDG is solving is imaginary. Oh really? What precisely is that problem? Is it search itself that you're referring to, or the prospect of going up against Google? If the former, then you are delusional, and if the latter, there is nothing wrong with attempting to disrupt a monopoly.
3. A search engine costs billions of dollars. Actually, no. There is no rule of computer science that says that. If someone discovers a new, cheaper way to do search then cool!
In answer to your final question, perhaps the reason this article is on HN is to inspire comments like yours, which are wrong, and then comments like mine, which correct comments like yours.
The privacy problem is imaginary because (a) only a puny fraction of users care, and (b) thanks to the "patriot" act, our ISPs are storing our search history anyway.
I have worked on search (see my background), and doing search well is massively difficult. The problem has deep necessary complexity, and Google has invested thousands of PhD years against that already. If Google were incompetent, maybe I could see it. But they're damned smart and their product is extremely good.
Data is also a problem - Microsoft has been collecting all your google searches since IE8, and can probably just clone Google's search results for the top few million queries. But even given that, Bing is a massive undertaking.
Since nobody uses DDG, Google can't be expected to make them a default search choice in Chrome. Accusing Google of some malfeasance is just childish and silly.
Finally, the name DDG is atrocious. Really bad in more ways than I have time to list.
"At the very least, this change means that the government can use a pen-trap to see the email addresses of people youre sending email to and the addresses of people who send email to you, along with the timestamp and size in bytes of each email. The FBI can monitor the IP addresses of all the computers you interact with over the Internet, or capture the IP addresses of every person visiting a particular website. Under the vaguely written statute, it may even be able to capture the URL of every web page that you read, although the FBI refuses to confirm or deny whether it has done so."
Sure, I should have inserted the word [can], but it hardly changes the point. Given the direction laws have taken since 9/11, you would be foolish to rely on your search activity remaining anonymous.
While awful, that is not in any way the same thing as ISPs storing our search history. It means that the FBI can monitor internet usage on an individual basis, not that the ISPs are tracking and storing everybody's internet usage.
I think the imaginary problem he meant was searching without being "tracked." The vast majority of users simply don't care. The ones who do can get around it.
1. Does anyone care about DDG anyway? I think it's safe to say, yes, there are some who do. I for one.
2. The problem DDG is solving is imaginary. Oh really? What precisely is that problem? Is it search itself that you're referring to, or the prospect of going up against Google? If the former, then you are delusional, and if the latter, there is nothing wrong with attempting to disrupt a monopoly.
3. A search engine costs billions of dollars. Actually, no. There is no rule of computer science that says that. If someone discovers a new, cheaper way to do search then cool!
In answer to your final question, perhaps the reason this article is on HN is to inspire comments like yours, which are wrong, and then comments like mine, which correct comments like yours.