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You are missing the entire point, "search" is sadly about advertising, not about the search itself :-)

Bing is interested serving DDG, Qwant, Ecosia and a lot of other unknown search engines because of the aggregated reach they provide for their ad network. Ad-networks only work if the aggregated audiences are massive, otherwise advertisers do not bother putting their ads there, only the top-3/5 ad networks get to see any action. So Bing wants/needs a bigger audience just to be on the game. They can grow in 2 paths: 1) increase Bing search reach (difficult), or 2) use partners with different value propositions.

Bing charges little for 1K query, 1USD officially but it gets cheaper, to zero :-) The real thing though, is that if you display Bing ads, you get a 70%-90% rev-share of the ad-revenue, which varies from country to country, something between $5 to $20 per 1K queries.

So, DDG basically gets around 5$ to 10$ net for each 1K, and can spend all that money on distribution and marketing so that they get even more users. Bing gets the rest, money, and what's more important, their ad-network continues to be competitive.

Everybody wins, right? :-/

Search is so cheap 1$/1K queries and people makes 2/3 queries per day, so $1/year/user (average). It makes no economic sense to build an alternative. Unless of course, you are building out of "ideals".



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