Since this is turning into a bit of a FAQ, I'll ask something I've been wondering. DDG is dependent on its competitors. If DDG gains significant market share, what is to protect it from them just blocking it?
Obviously there is a symboitic relationship with some of its sources, but not all. How does Google/Bing benefit from it using their results?
I believe DDG uses Yahoo! BOSS (http://developer.yahoo.com/search/boss/) as one of its primary indexes (check out DDG's FAQ). BOSS is a pay per use model (as due to Yahoo's deal with Microsoft, BOSS needs to charge to cover cost) - so it benefits Yahoo! directly. Also, now that Yahoo is out of search crawling/indexing business, it is not really concerned about DDG becoming a competitor - in fact it is a validation of the BOSS model which is something Yahoo will like to promote.
That's right. A couple of other data points. a) Ask/AOL also don't have crawlers and have significant share. b) There are a few places to get a decent base page rank feed now, and it appears to be increasing.
My understanding, as an outside observer, is that DDG is more about building a community (similar to HN, but probably more like metafilter). I get this idea from their offering of an XMPP service and site-specific syntax, so I may be off, but I would say they would like to cultivate a tight-nit community (I'm a scroogle user, but this sounds interesting depending on how they continue).
You are right -- we would very much like to cultivate a tight-nit community. At the same time, we'd like to go mainstream as well, and we hope the community will help us do so.
Obviously there is a symboitic relationship with some of its sources, but not all. How does Google/Bing benefit from it using their results?