DuckDuckGo

This article is about the search engine. For the children's game, see Duck, duck, goose.
DuckDuckGo

Screenshot of DuckDuckGo mainpage as of August, 2016
Type of site
 Web search engine
Available in English
Headquarters 20 Paoli Pike, Paoli, Pennsylvania, United States
Owner DuckDuckGo, Inc.
Created by Gabriel Weinberg
Slogan(s) The search engine that doesn't track you.
Website duckduckgo.com Tor: 3g2upl4pq6kufc4m.onion
Alexa rank Increase 638 (November 2016)[1]
Commercial Yes
Registration None
Launched September 25, 2008 (2008-09-25)
Current status Active
Written in Perl,[2] JavaScript[3]

DuckDuckGo (DDG) is an Internet search engine that emphasizes protecting searchers' privacy and avoiding the filter bubble of personalized search results.[2] DuckDuckGo distinguishes itself from other search engines by not profiling its users and by deliberately showing all users the same search results for a given search term.[4] DuckDuckGo emphasizes getting information from the best sources rather than the most sources, generating its search results from key crowdsourced sites such as Wikipedia and from partnerships with other search engines like Yandex, Yahoo!, Bing, and Yummly.[5][6]

The company is based in 20 Paoli Pike, Paoli, Pennsylvania, United States, in Greater Philadelphia, and has 21 employees. The company name originates from the children's game duck, duck, goose.[7][8]

Some of DuckDuckGo's source code is free software hosted at GitHub under the Apache 2.0 License,[9] but the core is proprietary. On 21 May 2014, DuckDuckGo launched a redesigned version that focused on smarter answers and a more refined look. The new version added often requested features such as images, local search, auto-suggest and more.[10]

On 18 September 2014, Apple included DuckDuckGo in its Safari browser as an optional search engine.[11][12] On 10 November 2014, Mozilla added DuckDuckGo as a search option to Firefox 33.1.[13]

History

DuckDuckGo was founded in 2008[14] by Gabriel Weinberg,[15][16] an entrepreneur whose last venture, The Names Database, was acquired by United Online in 2006 for $10 million.[17] Initially self-funded by Weinberg, DuckDuckGo is now advertising-supported but the user has the option to disable ads.[18] The search engine is written in Perl[19] and runs on nginx, FreeBSD and Linux.[2][20][21]

DuckDuckGo is built primarily upon search APIs from various vendors. Because of this, TechCrunch characterized the service as a "hybrid" search engine.[22][23] At the same time, it produces its own content pages, and thus is similar to Mahalo, Kosmix and SearchMe.[24]

The name of the search engine has been called "silly" by Frederic Lardinois of Read Write Web.[25] Weinberg explained the beginnings of the name with respect to the children's game duck, duck, goose. He said of the origin of the name, "Really it just popped in my head one day and I just liked it. It is certainly influenced/derived from duck duck goose, but other than that there is no relation, e.g., a metaphor."[26] DuckDuckGo has been featured on TechCrunch's Elevator Pitch Friday[22] and it was a finalist in the BOSS Mashable Challenge.[27]

We didn’t invest in it because we thought it would beat Google. We invested in it because there is a need for a private search engine. We did it for the Internet anarchists, people that hang out on Reddit and Hacker News.

Fred Wilson, 2012 TechCrunch Disrupt Conference in New York[28]

In July 2010, Weinberg started a DuckDuckGo community website to allow the public to report problems, discuss means of spreading the use of the search engine, request features, and discuss open sourcing the code.[29]

In September 2011 DuckDuckGo hired its first employee, Caine Tighe.[30] The next month, Union Square Ventures invested in DuckDuckGo. Union Square partner Brad Burnham stated, "We invested in DuckDuckGo because we became convinced that it was not only possible to change the basis of competition in search, it was time to do it."[31] In addition, Trisquel, Linux Mint and the Midori web browser switched to use DuckDuckGo as their default search engine.[32]

By May 2012, the search engine was attracting 1.5 million searches a day. Weinberg reported that it had earned US$115,000 in revenue in 2011 and had three employees, plus a small number of contractors.[33] Compete.com estimated 277,512 monthly visitors to the site in August 2012.[34] On April 12, 2011, Alexa reported a 3-month growth rate of 51%.[35] DuckDuckGo's own traffic statistics show that in August 2012 there were 1,393,644 visits per day, up from an average of 39,406 visits per day in April 2010 (the earliest data available).[36]

In a lengthy profile in November 2012, the Washington Post indicated that searches on DuckDuckGo numbered up to 45,000,000 per month in October 2012. The article concluded "Weinberg's non-ambitious goals make him a particularly odd and dangerous competitor online. He can do almost everything that Google or Bing can’t because it could damage their business models, and if users figure out that they like the DuckDuckGo way better, Weinberg could damage the big boys without even really trying. It's asymmetrical digital warfare, and his backers at Union Square Ventures say Google is vulnerable."[7]

GNOME replaced Google Search with DuckDuckGo as the default search engine in Web, the default GNOME web browser, starting with version 3.10, which was released on September 26, 2013.[37][38] At its keynote at WWDC 2014, Apple announced that DuckDuckGo would be included as an option for search on both iOS 8 and OS X Yosemite.[39]

On March 10, 2014 the Pale Moon web browser, starting with version 24.4.0, included DuckDuckGo as its default search engine as well as listed it on the browser's homepage.[40]

May 2014 redesign

In May 2014, DuckDuckGo released a redesigned version to beta testers through DuckDuckHack.[41] On 21 May 2014, DuckDuckGo officially released the redesigned version that focused on smarter answers and a more refined look. The new version added many new features such as images, local search, auto-suggest, weather, recipes and more.[10]

Overview

DuckDuckGo's results are a compilation of "about 50" sources,[42] including Yahoo! Search BOSS; Wikipedia; Wolfram Alpha; Bing; its own Web crawler, the DuckDuckBot; and others.[2][42][43] It also uses data from crowdsourced sites, including Wikipedia, to populate "Zero-click Info" boxes – grey boxes above the results that display topic summaries and related topics.[44]

DuckDuckGo positions itself as a search engine that puts privacy first and as such it does not store IP addresses, does not log user information and uses cookies only when needed. Weinberg states "By default, DuckDuckGo does not collect or share personal information. That is our privacy policy in a nutshell." However, they do maintain logs of all search terms used.[45]

Weinberg has refined the quality of his search engine results by deleting search results for companies he believes are content mills, like Demand Media's eHow, which publishes 4000 articles per day produced by paid freelance writers, which Weinberg says is, "...low-quality content designed specifically to rank highly in Google's search index." DuckDuckGo also filters pages with substantial advertising.[46]

Instant Answers

In addition to the indexed search results, DuckDuckGo displays relevant results, called Instant Answers,[47] on top of the search page. These Instant Answers are collected from either 3rd party APIs or static data sources like text files. The Instant Answers are called zeroclickinfo because the intention behind these is to provide what the user is searching for on the search result page itself so that the user doesn't have to click any results to find what they are looking for. As of August 20, 2016, there are 989 Instant Answers active.

The Instant Answers are open source.[48] They are maintained on Github and anyone can build or work on them.

Tor hidden service

In August 2010, DuckDuckGo introduced anonymous searching, including an exit enclave, for its search engine traffic using Tor network and enabling access through a Tor hidden service.[49][50] This allows anonymity by routing traffic through a series of encrypted relays. Weinberg stated: "I believe this fits right in line with our privacy policy. Using Tor and DDG, you can now be end to end anonymous with your searching. And if you use our encrypted homepage, you can be end to end encrypted as well."[51]

In 2011, DuckDuckGo introduced voice search for users of the Google Chrome's voice search extension.[52]

Bangs

DuckDuckGo includes "!Bang" commands, which give users the ability to conveniently search on specific websites – using the site's own search engine if applicable.[53] For example, searching for !w climate on DuckDuckgo will instantly return Wikipedia's Climate entry.

Business model

DuckDuckGo earns revenue in two ways:[54]

  1. Serving ads from the Yahoo-Bing search alliance network, and
  2. Affiliate relationships with several companies

Reception

In a June 2011 article, Harry McCracken of Time magazine commended DuckDuckGo, comparing it to his favorite hamburger restaurant, In-N-Out Burger:

It feels a lot like early Google, with a stripped-down home page. Just as In-N-Out doesn't have lattes or Asian salads or sundaes or scrambled eggs, DDG doesn't try to do news or blogs or books or images. There's no auto-completion or instant results. It just offers core Web search—mostly the "ten blue links" approach that's still really useful, no matter what its critics say...As for the quality, I'm not saying that Weinberg has figured out a way to return more relevant results than Google's mighty search team. But DuckDuckGo...is really good at bringing back useful sites. It all feels meaty and straightforward and filler-free...[55]

The barebones approach cited in his quote have since changed; DuckDuckGo now has auto-completion and instant results for example. McCracken included the site in Time's list of "50 Best Websites of 2011".[56]

Thom Holwerda, who reviewed the search engine for OSNews, praised its privacy features and shortcuts to site-specific searches as well as criticizing Google for "track[ing] pretty much everything you do", particularly because of the risk of such information being subject to a U.S. government subpoena.[57] In 2012, in response to accusations that it was a monopoly, Google identified DuckDuckGo as a competitor. Weinberg was reportedly "pleased and entertained" by that acknowledgment.[7]

Traffic

It took 1445 days to get 1M searches,
483 days to get 2M searches,
and then just 8 days to pass 3M searches: https://duckduckgo.com/traffic/

DuckDuckGo Twitter account (@duckduckgo), 18 June 2013[58][59][60]

In June 2013, DuckDuckGo indicated that it had seen a significant traffic increase; according to the website's Twitter account, on Monday June 17, 2013, it had three million daily direct searches. On average during May 2013, it had 1.8 million daily direct searches. Some[61] relate this claim to the exposure of PRISM and to the fact that other programs operated by the National Security Agency (NSA) were leaked by Edward Snowden. Danny Sullivan wrote on Search Engine Land that despite the search engine's growth "it's not grown anywhere near the amount to reflect any substantial or even mildly notable switching by the searching public" for reasons due to privacy, and he concluded "No One Cares About "Private" Search".[62] In response, Caleb Garling of the San Francisco Chronicle argued: "I think this thesis suffers from a few key failures in logic" because a traffic increase had occurred and because there was a lack of widespread awareness of the existence of DuckDuckGo.[63] Later in September 2013, the search engine hit 4 million searches per day.[64][65][66] On March 23, 2015, DuckDuckGo retrieved more than 9 million searches for the first day in its history. That month also saw the search engine retrieve more than 250 million searches, another record for the company.[67]

Date # searches (direct) # searches (API) # searches (bot)
2010-04-01 33,209
2011-01-01 66,042
2012-01-01 393,933 7,976,354 162,217
2013-01-01 1,349,922 10,669,315 249,455
2014-01-01 3,736,154 16,080,583 394,102
2015-01-01 6,631,634 12,165,975 696,901
2016-01-01 9,642,220 9,607,471 1,294,731

See also

References

  1. ↑ "Duckduckgo.com Site Info". Alexa Internet. Retrieved 7 November 2016.
  2. 1 2 3 4 Buys, Jon (July 10, 2010). "DuckDuckGo: A New Search Engine Built from Open Source". GigaOM OStatic blog. Retrieved March 19, 2013.
  3. ↑ "Architecture". DuckDuckGo Community Platform. Retrieved March 6, 2015.
  4. ↑ "dontbubble.us". Retrieved 2014-09-12.
  5. ↑ "Sources". DuckDuckGo Help pages. DuckDuckGo. Archived from the original on January 24, 2015. Retrieved 24 January 2015.
  6. ↑ "DuckDuckGo & Yummly team up so you can search food porn in private". VentureBeat. June 11, 2014. Retrieved June 11, 2014.
  7. 1 2 3 Rosenwald, Michael (November 9, 2012). "Ducking Google in search engines". The Washington Post. Retrieved March 19, 2013.
  8. ↑ Arthur, Charles. "NSA scandal delivers record numbers of internet users to DuckDuckGo." The Guardian. July 10, 2013. Retrieved July 10, 2013.
  9. ↑ "duckduckgo". GitHub Inc. March 16, 2012. Retrieved March 19, 2012.
  10. 1 2 "DuckDuckGo Reimagined & Redesigned".
  11. ↑ "Big Win For DuckDuckGo: Apple Adding To Safari As Private Search Option". Retrieved 2014-09-30.
  12. ↑ "Apple - OS X Yosemite - Apps". Retrieved 2014-09-30.
  13. ↑ "Firefox Notes". Mozilla.org. Retrieved 11 November 2014.
  14. ↑ Titlow, John Paul (February 20, 2014). "Inside DuckDuckGo, Google's Tiniest, Fiercest Competitor". Fast Company. Retrieved December 4, 2016.
  15. ↑ "Company History". Duckduckgo.com. June 3, 2013. Retrieved August 8, 2013.
  16. ↑ "Search Engine and Privacy by Gabriel Weinberg". Eyerys. Retrieved March 14, 2015.
  17. ↑ "Acquisition of Namesdatabase.com Expands Company's Classmates Online Social Networking Unit". Houston Chronicle. March 20, 2006.
  18. ↑ "Duck Duck Go Startup Profile". Chouprojects.com. Retrieved January 28, 2014.
  19. ↑ "DuckDuckGoPerl · duckduckgo/duckduckgo Wiki · GitHub". Github. Retrieved May 10, 2016.
  20. ↑ Weinberg, Gabriel. "About Duck Duck Go". Duckduckgo.com. Retrieved February 10, 2011.
  21. ↑ "Architecture". DuckDuckGo.com. January 28, 2013. Retrieved June 11, 2013.
  22. 1 2 Kimerling, Dan (December 12, 2008). "Elevator Pitch Friday: Duck Duck Go, the Hybrid Search Engine". Techcrunch. Retrieved March 19, 2013.
  23. ↑ Weinberg, Gabriel (as epi0Bauqu) (March 25, 2010). "Duck Duck Go is starting to get coverage (thread: see remarks by Weinberg)". YCombinator Hacker News. Retrieved March 19, 2013.
  24. ↑ "Duck Duck Go Company Profile". Crunchbase.com.
  25. ↑ Lardnois, Frederic (April 30, 2009). "Duck Duck Go: Silly Name, Interesting Search Engine". ReadWriteWeb. Retrieved March 19, 2013.
  26. ↑ Weinberg, Gabriel (as epi0Bauqu) (June 11, 2009). "How Often our Anti-spam Search Toolbar Blocks Sites (thread)". YCombinator Hacker News. Retrieved March 19, 2013.
  27. ↑ Hirsch, Adam (October 7, 2008). "Voting Round for the BOSS Mashable Challenge". Mashable. Retrieved March 19, 2013.
  28. ↑ Ludwig, Sean (May 21, 2012). "Fred Wilson: We invested in DuckDuckGo for the Reddit, Hacker News anarchists". VentureBeat. Retrieved January 29, 2013.
  29. ↑ Weinberg, Gabriel (July 2010). "duck.co – The DuckDuckGo Community". Retrieved July 21, 2010.
  30. ↑ Weinberg, Gabriel (September 30, 2011). "Inbound Hiring". gabrielweinberg.com blog. Retrieved March 19, 2013.
  31. ↑ Burnham, Brad (October 13, 2011). "Duck Duck Go". Union Square Ventures blog. Retrieved October 14, 2011.
  32. ↑ Mithrandir (November 25, 2010). "DuckDuckGo in Web Browser". Trisquel.info. Retrieved March 19, 2013.
  33. ↑ Farivar, Cyrus (May 16, 2012). "Private: some search engines make money by not tracking users". Ars Technica. Retrieved May 14, 2012.
  34. ↑ "DuckDuckGo Analytics Profile". Compete.com.
  35. ↑ "DuckDuckGo Analytics Profile". Alexa.com.
  36. ↑ "DuckDuckGo Official traffic".
  37. ↑ "Claudio Saavedra's ChangeLog – August 2013".
  38. ↑ Clasen, Matthias (26 September 2013). "GNOME 3.10 Released". GNOME mailing list. Retrieved 26 September 2013.
  39. ↑ "DuckDuckGo In Apple OS". BusinessInsider. Retrieved 2014-06-06.
  40. ↑ "Pale Moon 24.4.0 Release Notes". Pale Moon. Moonchild Productions. Retrieved 4 June 2015.
  41. ↑ "DuckDuckGo". Next.duckduckgo.com. Retrieved 2014-05-11.
  42. 1 2 "Sources". DuckDuckGo Support Center. January 8, 2013. Retrieved March 19, 2013.
  43. ↑ "Wolfram Alpha and DuckDuckGo Partner on API Binding and Search Integration". Wolframalpha.com. April 18, 2011.
  44. ↑ "About Duck Duck Go". Duckduckgo.com.
  45. ↑ "DDG Privacy". Duckduckgo.com.
  46. ↑ Mims, Christopher (July 26, 2010). "The Search Engine Backlash Against 'Content Mills'". Technology Review. Retrieved March 19, 2013.
  47. ↑ "DuckDuckGo Instant Answers".
  48. ↑ "Instant Answer repositories on Github". Retrieved Jul 7, 2015.
  49. ↑ "Tor Exit Enclave". Help pages - DuckDuckGo Community Platform.
  50. ↑ Weinberg, Gabriel (August 13, 2010). "DuckDuckGo now operates a Tor exit enclave". Gabriel Weinberg's Blog. Retrieved 26 June 2014.
  51. ↑ Weinberg, Gabriel (August 13, 2010). "DuckDuckGo now operates a Tor exit enclave". gabrielweinberg.com blog. Retrieved March 19, 2013.
  52. ↑ "DuckDuckGo Tools". Duckduckgo.com
  53. ↑ "!Bang". Duckduckgo.com. n.d. Retrieved August 19, 2011.
  54. ↑ "Advertising and Affiliates". DuckDuckGo Community Platform. Retrieved 2015-06-04.
  55. ↑ McCracken, Harry (June 14, 2011). "Duck Duck Go, the In-N-Out Burger of Search Engines". Time. Retrieved March 19, 2013.
  56. ↑ McCracken, Harry (August 16, 2011). "DuckDuckGo – The 50 Best Websites of 2011". Time. Retrieved March 19, 2013.
  57. ↑ Holwerda, Thom (June 21, 2011). "DuckDuckGo: The Privacy-centric Alternative to Google". OSNews. Retrieved March 19, 2013.
  58. ↑ "Twitter / duckduckgo: It took 1445 days to get 1M ...". duckduckgo. 18 June 2013. Archived from the original on 6 June 2014. Retrieved 16 October 2013.
  59. ↑ McGee, Matt (18 June 2013). "DuckDuckGo Passes 3 Million Searches, Just 8 Days After Hitting 2 Million". Search Engine Land. Archived from the original on 12 October 2013. Retrieved 12 October 2013.
  60. ↑ Weber, Harrison (18 June 2013). "Google alternative DuckDuckGo hit nearly 3.1M queries yesterday, up 50% in 8 days as PRISM fears rise". The Next Web. Archived from the original on 12 October 2013. Retrieved 12 October 2013.
  61. ↑ Krieger, Michael (Jul 10, 2013). "Search Engine "Duck Duck Go" Experiences Traffic Surge in Wake of NSA Scandal". Liberty Blitzkrieg. Retrieved 7 March 2015.
  62. ↑ Sullivan, Danny (June 22, 2013). "Duck Duck Go's Post-PRISM Growth Actually Proves No One Cares About "Private" Search". Search Engine Land. Retrieved July 10, 2013.
  63. ↑ Garling, Caleb (June 24, 2013). "Huge traffic spike hits 'private' search engines after NSA leaks". San Francisco Chronicle. Retrieved July 10, 2013.
  64. ↑ Gross, Grant (10 October 2013). "People flock to anonymizing services after NSA snooping reports". PCWorld Australia. Archived from the original on 12 October 2013. Retrieved 12 October 2013.
  65. ↑ Miller, Ron (16 September 2013). "DuckDuckGo continues making huge audience gains". FierceContentManagement. Archived from the original on 12 October 2013. Retrieved 12 October 2013.
  66. ↑ Leonhard, Woody (13 September 2013). "DuckDuckGo going straight up". InfoWorld. Archived from the original on 12 October 2013. Retrieved 12 October 2013.
  67. ↑ "Traffic". Duckduckgo. 3 April 2015. Retrieved 6 April 2015.
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