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DuckDuckGo

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This article is about the search engine. For the children's game, see Duck, duck, goose.
DuckDuckGo
File:Duck Duck Go.svg
File:DuckDuckGo Screenshot.png
Type of site
search engine
HeadquartersValley Forge, PA, United States
OwnerDuckDuckGo, Inc.
Created byGabriel Weinberg
URLduckduckgo.com
CommercialYes
RegistrationNone

DuckDuckGo is an Internet search engine, and uses information from crowdsourced websites such as Wikipedia to obtain its results. The search engine policy says that it protects privacy, and does not record user information.[2] Because users are not profiled, the "filter bubble" can be avoided, with all users being shown the same search results for a given search term.

Some of the code of DuckDuckGo is free software distributed at GitHub under the Perl 5 license.[3]

The company is based in Paoli, Pennsylvania, United States.[4]

History

DuckDuckGo was founded by Gabriel Weinberg, an entrepreneur whose last venture, The Names Database, was acquired by United Online in 2006 for $10 million.[5] Initially self-funded by Weinberg, DuckDuckGo is now occasionally advertising-supported.[6] The search engine is written in Perl and runs on nginx and FreeBSD.[2][7][8]

DuckDuckGo is built primarily upon search APIs from various vendors (such as Yahoo! Search BOSS). Because of this, TechCrunch characterized the service as a "hybrid" search engine.[9][10] At the same time, it produces its own content pages, and thus is similar to Mahalo, Kosmix and SearchMe.[11]

The name of the search engine has been called "silly" by Frederic Lardinois of Read Write Web.[12] Weinberg 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 [the game] duck duck goose, but other than that there is no relation, e.g., a metaphor."[13]

DuckDuckGo has been featured on TechCrunch's Elevator Pitch Friday[14] and it was a finalist in the BOSS Mashable Challenge.[15]

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[16]

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.[17]

In September 2011 DuckDuckGo hired its first employee, Caine Tighe.[18] The next month, Union Square Ventures invested in DDG. 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."[19] Linux Mint signed an exclusive deal with DuckDuckGo in November and it is the default search engine for Linux Mint 12.[20] In addition, Trisquel and the Midori web browser use DuckDuckGo as their default search engine.[21]

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.[22]

Compete.com estimated 277,512 monthly visitors to the site in August 2012.[23] On April 12, 2011, Alexa reported a 3 month growth rate of 51%.[24] DuckDuckGo's own traffic statistics show that in August 2012 there were about 1,393,644 visits per day, from an average of 39,406 visits per day in April 2010 (the earliest data avaliable). [25]

In a lengthy profile in November 2012, the Washington Post indicated that searches on DuckDuckGo were 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."[26]

Features

DuckDuckGo's results are a compilation of many sources, including Yahoo! Search BOSS, Wikipedia, Wolfram Alpha, Bing, and its own Web crawler, the DuckDuckBot.[2][27][28]It uses data from crowd-sourced sites, including Wikipedia, to populate "Zero-click Info" boxes—grey boxes above the results that display topic summaries and related topics.[29] DuckDuckGo also offers the ability to show mostly shopping sites or mostly info (non-shopping) websites via search buttons on its home page.

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."[30]

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.[31]

In August 2010 DuckDuckGo introduced anonymous searching, including an exit enclave, for its search engine traffic using Tor. 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."[32]

In 2011, DuckDuckGo introduced voice search for users of the Google Chrome "Voice Search" extension.[33]

DuckDuckGo also features what they call "!Bang" commands, which give users the ability to redirect a search to specific websites.[34]

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 Duck Duck Go...is really good at bringing back useful sites. It all feels meaty and straightforward and filler-free..."[35]

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. [36]

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.[26]

See also

References

  1. ^ "Duckduckgo.com Site Info". Alexa Internet. Retrieved 2013-02-03.
  2. ^ a b c Buys, Jon (2010). "DuckDuckGo: A New Search Engine Built from Open Source". Retrieved July 16, 2010. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)
  3. ^ GitHub Inc (March 16, 2012). "duckduckgo". Retrieved March 19, 2012.
  4. ^ Michael Rosenwald. "Ducking Google in search engines". The Washington Post. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |lastaccessdate= ignored (help)
  5. ^ United Online, Inc. (March 20, 2006). "Acquisition of Namesdatabase.com Expands Company's Classmates Online Social Networking Unit".
  6. ^ "Duck Duck Go younoodle Startup Profile".
  7. ^ Weinberg, Gabriel. "About Duck Duck Go". Retrieved February 10, 2011.
  8. ^ Warner, Andrew. "How The Founder Of Duck Duck Go Previously Bootstrapped A $10 Mil Company – with Gabriel Weinberg". Retrieved February 10, 2011.
  9. ^ Dan Kimerling. "Duck Duck Go, the Hybrid Search Engine".
  10. ^ Gabriel Weinberg. "Public remarks by Gabriel Weinberg".
  11. ^ "Duck Duck Go Company Profile".
  12. ^ Frederic Lardnois (April 30, 2009). "Duck Duck Go: Silly Name, Interesting Search Engine".
  13. ^ "Hacker News Thread".
  14. ^ Dan Kimerling (December 12, 2008). "Duck Duck Go, The Hybrid Search Engine".
  15. ^ Adam Hirsch (October 7, 2008). "Voting Round for the BOSS Mashable Challenge".
  16. ^ Ludwig, Sean (May 21, 2012 8:08 AM). "Fred Wilson: We invested in DuckDuckGo for the Reddit, Hacker News anarchists". VentureBeat. Retrieved 29 January 2013. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  17. ^ Weinberg, Gabriel (2010). "duck.co - The DuckDuckGo Community". Retrieved July 21, 2010. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)
  18. ^ Weinberg, Gabriel (2010). "Inbound Hiring". Retrieved September 30, 2010. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)
  19. ^ Burnham, Brad (2011). "Duck Duck Go". Retrieved October 14, 2011. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)
  20. ^ muktware.com (2011). "DuckDuckGo Results No Better Than Bing, Becomes Default Search Engine Of Linux Mint". muktware. Retrieved Nov 11, 2011. {{cite news}}: Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)
  21. ^ DuckDuckGo in Web Browser
  22. ^ Farivar, CYRUS (May 16, 2012). "Private: some search engines make money by not tracking users". Ars Technica. Retrieved May 14, 2012.
  23. ^ "Compete.com Analytics Profile".
  24. ^ "Alexa.com Analytics Profile".
  25. ^ "DuckDuckGo Official traffic".
  26. ^ a b Simmers, Sean (November 9, 2012). "Ducking Google in Search Engines". Washington Post.
  27. ^ DuckDuckGo (8 January 2013). "Sources".
  28. ^ "Wolfram". April 18, 2011. {{cite news}}: Text "Alpha and DuckDuckGo Partner on API Binding and Search Integration" ignored (help)
  29. ^ Duck Duck Go, Inc. "About Duck Duck Go".
  30. ^ DDG Privacy
  31. ^ Mims, Christopher (2010). "The Search Engine Backlash Against 'Content Mills'". Retrieved July 26, 2010. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)
  32. ^ Weinberg, Gabriel (2010). "DuckDuckGo now operates a Tor exit enclave". Retrieved September 30, 2010. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)
  33. ^ DuckDuckGo Tools
  34. ^ DuckDuckGo (undated). "!Bang". Retrieved August 19, 2011. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |year= (help)
  35. ^ McCracken, Harry (2011). "Duck Duck Go, the In-N-Out Burger of Search Engines". Time Inc. Retrieved June 14, 2011. {{cite news}}: Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)
  36. ^ Holwerda, Thom (2011). "DuckDuckGo: The Privacy-centric Alternative to Google". OSNews. Retrieved June 21, 2011. {{cite news}}: Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)

External links

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