I love DDG (and have been using it as my primary search engine for about six months) but I feel like the hacker community (including me) forgets that DDG is a for-profit corporation, and that at some level posting these kinds of links is more or less the same as just giving them free advertising.
The quality of DDGs results is related in part to the number of users they have:
- they use link clicks to determine coherence between query and result. More users => more clicks => greater coherence
- they fund themselves using advertising, so their revenue is roughly proportional to their number of users. Increasing users => increasing money => more money to devote towards improving results
If one is interested in improving the results of DDG, then providing them with free advertising is an easy way to do it.
I'm not disagreeing with your point (or the network effect in general), but I guess I worry that if we don't engage in some early skepticism, we're going to end up with another Google or Facebook on our hands.
Why is that bad? If we can encourage companies to be open source and privacy conscious, isn't that a win? And in this case, the free advertising is coming because it is a good product.
