Yahoo gave up on being a technology leader when they killed their own search. If I was Mayer I would buy DuckDuckGo and say fuck it, we're taking on Google.
yes, there's a lot of misconceptions here on hn about what DDG actually is. Indexing the web, now, is beyond the capabilities and budget of individuals, you need the resources and backing of a company like google, ibm or microsoft to do so. DDG is federated search, not a search engine. While they might crawl a few sites, it's Bing that you're seeing in the result, the work of Microsoft engineers (along with any remaining PowerSet guys.)
From a thread on DDG's community site DDG uses Yahoo Boss (not sure if that's Bing powered now) but I would bet anything it can fall over to Bing without too many issues. It came up during a discussion of the new Bing pricing which should come into affect in 2 days or so. DDG does crawl some things directly as well (DuckDuckBot) but its nowhere close to the scope of Bing/Google. DDG also does meta searchs using API's such has,
The top zero click result is from other sources on the web (disclosure the last one comes from my site).
The only search engine I have found which gets close to this is VerticalSet although with the new Bing pricing I am not sure how long it will exist for now.
I know that YC has a stake in the Duck and pardon my ignorance but what is so "racketish-science" here in DDG that Marissa and bunch of Google engineers couldn't come up with on their own terms, without having to reach out to Y! wallet?
I don't know if buying DDG would be a good investment.
Yahoo! had a great search engine to begin with. There wasn't anything wrong with it, really. I think Yahoo! just got a bit carried away with the UI aspect of it.
DDG prides itself on privacy and no tracking while giving good results. I don't think Yahoo! would be interested in keeping that tradition.
Though, I could be wrong, of course.
edit: was supposed to reply to the other guy... oops.. message still stands.
Yahoo! gave up on being a technology leader long before search imploded on them and they were forced to give it up. They gave up on that in a very definitive way when a clueless board chose Terry Semel to run the company in the belief that they were a "media company".
Actually no, we've got our own multi-billion page index, however we do farm out the long tail stuff (like hiybbpraqag :-). At some point I should get a blog post up about modern web indexes, its really fascinating to look at the relevance curves of the first few billion pages out to the first trillion page mark.
There's not been a good simple general directory since yahoo stopped being one. Search is one thing, structured reference is different. Though it is a much more difficult problem now and would need a completely different approach to achieve it.
The Y! Directory is still alive @ http://dir.yahoo.com/. Also, the Open Directory Project has been around for years and years, http://www.dmoz.org/. A few clicks around reminds me why directories were made obsolete.
You are talking about our knowledge of the universe. Our knowledge of the universe is a lot smaller than the entire contents of the Internet (sad, but ultimately true).
There is a reason why directories died and search took their place. Directories, in the form we know them, do not scale. There are far more people who would work to fill them with junk than there are people who would work to create order from chaos.
And then there's the question of how you remain objective.
And isn't Wikipedia really the answer to what you want? If you want a directory of ... well, not the Internet, but at least of our knowledge? It may not primarily be a link farm, but it usually provides a good starting point for most topics.
Wikipedia fails to link to a lot great in-depth sources of content that don't provide useful encyclopedia citations. For example, great forums on a particular topic that is not a provider of any coated fact.
If directories are really useful and people want/need them, why has the Open Directory Project stranded? Why doesn't anyone use it? Why doesn't anyone talk about it? And if people do not like that particular project, why has there been no spinoffs, no copycats, no startups to do Directory 2.0?
Wikipedia might not work as a direct replacement for directory services, but when it comes to helping you acquire knowledge, I think it does a better job. Even when the articles you find are sparse because they might help you formulate better queries to stuff into The Google.
