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Danny looks at how Google alters search results based on things like location, previous searches, social sharing and aggregate searches of others. (By the way, Danny points out that Bing does this, as well.)

Search Engine Land:
Of “Magic Keywords” & Flavors Of Personalized Search At Google

Then there's DuckDuckGo ..."DuckDuckGo does not track users. It doesn’t generate search results based on a user’s previous interests, potentially filtering out relevant information... It is not cluttered with ads. ... its use is soaring, with searches up from 10 million a month in October 2011 to 45 million this past October."

Wow, that's excellent, Ellen. I will definitely need to check that out and see how the experience compares.

I saw the piece on DuckDuckGo in the Post. Very interesting. It says they are using Yahoo/Bing for most of their search results. Interestingly, Bing themselves was caught scraping searches from Google.

They are focusing in on the big searches and adding data from third parties. Others have tried that... will be more interesting when they start crawling and creating their own results.

Alright, so we have a couple of threads on the forum talking about duck duck go.... I'm going to jump in and let you guys know how they make money. I was curious, so I did a little research (on Google...lol). Duck Duck Go gets advertising revenue by being in the Bing/Yahoo syndication network and providing "sponsored links" as well as being an e-commerce affiliate for places like Amazon and eBay. So every "sponsored link" click, they make a little bit of money... and every time someone buys a product on Amazon by first going through Duck Duck Go search engine, they make a little bit of money.

I thought everyone might find that interesting, especially if you were wondering how they're able to function (like I was).

Good investigation Eric. Affiliate revenue is not a bad place to start. If they can create an experience that some people prefer over Google, they would probably back fill with their own ad services. Right now they are just trying to find some differentiation over Google.... privacy is a good place to start.

It is very crazy how people take the major search engines, add their own flair to it and make it more marketable.

Another one that comes to mind is http://www.blackle.com/

They took the same road as affiliates and basically just took the Google background and made it black, marketing it as a energy saving Google. Interestingly enough, they are under investigation for claims of energy savings, but it did make quite a bit of cash for the innovator.

Yea Eric thanks for the info