Having been through similar decision making processes myself (with the Google Custom Search API, the Google Translate API, etc), this is just as likely an abuse mitigation technique as it is a revenue generation opportunity.<p>Requiring even a modest at-cost fee for a web service does wonders to discourage all sorts of misuse, from wanton large-scale data mining, to blatant repacking and resale, to worse. (Heck, simply requiring a valid credit card alone helps.)<p>And sadly no, simply having low quotas for free access doesn't entirely suffice. If there's material value to be extracted from a free service, you'd be amazed at the lengths people will go through to create large numbers of low-volume scrapers. Most of these are obvious and easy to detect and defeat, but continually doing so adds up in cost, and it takes engineers away from providing better services to legitimate customers.<p>In short, most people on the outside don't appreciate just how difficult the handful of bad guys make it for companies to do something good for the other 99%. So I'm sympathetic to Microsoft here, I really am.
This got me thinking...is it possible for Microsoft to <i>secretly</i> buy out DDG and leave them the fuck alone except where they need help(ie. access to Bing index)?<p>For all the money the Bing unit keeps pouring, I feel buying DDG and leaving them the heck alone can be a reasonable long-term bet with relatively little risk.<p>The challenge would be to keep the founders/team motivated. They could spin it off as a completely different company on IPO track and give significant equity. But then what if Google wants to buy them out? And of course, the Bing team may have a problem with MSFT creating internal competition though that may just push em to do better.<p>More likely if DuckDuckGo gets in an acquisition bidding war, I put my money on Gabe passing acquisition for raising a huge funding round that lets him take some money off the table.<p>With all the flaws(enough that I don't use it), it remains a rare search engine start-up that has its heart in the right place: to actually serve consumers versus build some technology or team and get acquired(looking at you, Powerset).
Time for people to start supporting something like Common Crawl <a href="http://commoncrawl.org/" rel="nofollow">http://commoncrawl.org/</a> to build their own search engines.
This seems like an odd move. It's not like bing has any traction with developers at all. Wouldn't charging them make it even harder to gain traction? I am not familiar with thei API, what does it have over google that would make me pay for it?
In my experience with the Bing API in the last several months, I've found that you get what you pay for. Its performance has been inconsistent at best, to the point which I created the site <a href="http://isthebingapiworking.heroku.com/" rel="nofollow">http://isthebingapiworking.heroku.com/</a>. The web search api frequently <i>orders of magnitude</i> fewer results than the actual website, a problem making a frequent theme in their developer forums <a href="http://www.bing.com/community/developer/f/12254.aspx" rel="nofollow">http://www.bing.com/community/developer/f/12254.aspx</a>.<p>By charging for their search API, I would just say that Microsoft is beginning to take their API seriously. It seems pretty clear that minimal resources, if any, were dedicated to the free version.<p>I'm bummed, because I've found relative success using their news search api (particularly for the article aggregation component of <a href="http://www.congressionalprimaries.org/" rel="nofollow">http://www.congressionalprimaries.org/</a>), and now we'll have to look into alternatives, but if this means actually providing a decent product, I think this is a good move for Microsoft.
No surprise there. I wonder if all the faux search engines will have to start either crawling/indexing, or transition to Knowledge Engines ( I'm looking at you DDG ). Curious to see if this sparks people to start more search companies.
Actually the search API would be interesting for domain specific search. You can use the API to create a site to present result specific to MP3, for example, formatting the result with the MP3 attributes.