melted

Even just reverse proxy in front (written in C++, naturally) would have probably saved the situation.

Insane web traffic doesn't actually cost you much. Au contraire, my friend, it brings in the dough. What costs you money is the long tail, those deep, obscure searches which you have to answer to be perceived a worthwhile competitor to e.g. Google. To answer the long tail yourself you must have it in the index, which makes for a _very_ big index. And then you also have to figure out how to get the relevant results out of there in a hundred milliseconds (or 50ms if you're Google, and you have instant search), and update all that goodness to keep it fresh, so that it doesn't take three months for new pages to appear. If you think this wouldn't cost much to a startup, you don't know much about search.

And you don't need to doubt that figure, Microsoft discloses it in its financial results.

Microsoft spends over $1B/yr on maintaining and improving Bing. So yeah, search does cost a fortune if you want to do it reasonably well without relying on others for results. Not only do you have to crawl the web (with different frequencies depending on predicted frequency of content update, etc), you then have to rebuild the index continuously, with reasonable latency. To do all of that, you have to have indexing infrastructure, which in turns requires storage infrastructure, high performanc data processing infrastructure (Hadoop ain't gonna do it, ask Yahoo as to why), which in turn requires high performance networking (or your mapreduce-like workloads will collapse under their own weight), your own datacenter, and your own army of machine learning researchers, systems engineers, hardware engineers, networking engineers, devops, quality engineers (people who improve your scoring function), human eval, etc, etc, etc. If anything, $1B/yr seems to be quite low.

Looks like my information is either out of date or was incorrect all along. Bing seems to be the primary source. They seem to also have a crawler now, though it's not clear how much it really covers. Very cool. Slow and steady wins the race.

You seem to have forgotten to plug your product.

Google is one of DDGs backends, and the highest quality one at that. DDG does not have its own crawlers or index. Nor could it: those things cost hundreds of millions of dollars per year to run and maintain.

[Edit: apparently this is not true. DDG does not use Google, though it does use Bing and some other broad and narrow coverage search engines]

And that's exactly my point. It doesn't have to be this way.

They should just switch to showing nothing but ads in the first page of results and be done with it. I'm sure they will find a way to justify how this is "good for the users", but for me, with my widescreen laptop, the 4th ad will ruin usability even further.

At one point Microsoft had an option to buy Google for peanuts. Ballmer declined because he didn't see how it'd ever make money.

DDG exists because Google lets it exist. It's not really a full blown search engine.

Which, nevertheless, means that people aren't really ruling, and therefore it's not what one could legitimately call "people's rule". Their elected "representatives" (which, let me remind you, don't give a shit about their constituents between elections) write laws. The president, elected by the electoral college people elect (who also doesn't give a shit about the constituents) signs the laws and commands the army which will suppress any challenge to the authority of the federal government with violence if need be. And courts (in which judges aren't elected at all and don't have to give a shit about anybody), interpret the laws.

Why do we need so many middlemen? Is this _really_ a democracy? Or is it a mere visibility of "rule of the people" designed to keep the working class, well, working, for the benefit of the ruling class?

Prediction: within 2 years Apple will have iPhone 7s, on which no one can bypass the encryption no matter what. All they'd have to do is put secure enclave software into ROM burned at the factory, and make it self-destruct if it's tampered with. "Sorry officer, not even we can bypass exponential back-off on this CPU."

I'd rather they worked on improving IDE support for Clang and LLVM when it comes to "unmanaged" languages, as well as moved some of those compiler and optimization engineers to improving LLVM. LLVM still lags a bit behind GCC when it comes to performance of the machine code it generates, so I'm sure improvements there would be quite welcome, and I'm also sure Microsoft has the expertise to make it happen. For extra brownie points, help the community implement a portable debugger that doesn't suck, because thus far all attempts at this have failed miserably.

Microsoft C++ compiler is a source of aggravation at best. Their unmanaged language tooling has been neglected for nearly a decade while FOSS community (led by none other than Apple) plowed ahead and delivered the work of art that is Clang/LLVM, and a profusion of languages like Rust and Swift that run on top of that infrastructure.

Tried it a while back. Reverted to just using web UI. Not quite there yet.

Why "missing" though? On Windows 10, Mail is quite nice. On OSX there's Airmail. On Linux there's bupkis, but that's really not what Linux is for.