That isn't an accurate characterization of what we do now. We have on the order of a million lines of search code at this point and have a lot of talented people working them. As an example, mobile searches are the largest category of searches, and local searches are the largest category of searches within mobile. We don't get any local search content from Bing. Instead our local search content is a combination of our own indexes in partnership with Apple, TripAdvisor, and others. And then we have to further have a lot of code to know when and where to display that content on the page relative to other types of results, when to reject that content for not being relevant enough to display, and how to display parts of it that are relevant enough. In addition, we currently do not use Yandex for search content.
My sites are technically present, but shown only when I search for the exact domain (bikegremlin.com) or the site name (BikeGremlin).
But none of my articles are shown in SERP when I search queries that otherwise get my articles to top-3 on Google.
I've tried submitting URLs for indexing, to see if that will help, now that at least some problems seem to have been fixed. We'll know in a few days... weeks... months if that's helped. :)
So far, articles in my native are back, at least to a degree.
But none of my articles in English, even those that used to rank highly (both on Google and Bing/DuckDuckGo etc).
What are you doing to improve the quality of these results? I often find myself hitting !g because Google just understands what I want better. And that's not with these constantly hyped "local" or "contextual" searches, no, it's the searches for errors, programming problems or memes (which, of course, can be vague). I would gladly submit you some of the requests I use !g for if you had a low-friction UI for it. Maybe you could use some more data on this stuff.
You're also in a unique position to compete with Google by offering advanced search tools. You have the data! Yet I can only search images by "past day", "past week", "past month". Off to Google I go again.
In the same vein, what are you doing to combat SEO spam? Again, you're in the unique position to do something for the public good and your profits here. Your search engine also suffers from the many low quality results of "buy buy buy" (the thing I want information on, not buy, god damn it) and github/SO rehashing sites, ad-laden blog spam and the like.
But imagine if it didn't! Imagine the web being searchable again!
Currently I somewhat follow projects like search.marginalia.nu and mwmbwl (or something), but those don't even have 0.1% of your funding.
I just want to be able to find content made by humans again ...
Doesn't change the fact that ddg is basically a front for mostly Bing (plus a few others for local stuff etc) though.
Why not actually investing in real search technology and become an actual search engine?
We've invested many tens of millions of dollars in search technology and continue to do so. Local was just one example, chosen because as noted it is the largest category of searches.
