Privacy focused search engine DuckDuckGo surpasses 10 million daily queries
DuckDuckGo announced they hit a milestone, surpassing the 10 million daily query mark on June 22, 2015. DuckDuckGo saw 10,218,617 queries on June 22nd alone. The company gives credit to that surge in users based on them being a privacy focused search engine. Gabriel Weinberg wrote, "we're proud to be helping so many people take back their privacy." DuckDuckGo has grown 600% since Edward Snowden's NSA surveillance news broke two years ago. And yet only a few percent of people have even heard of DuckDuckGo and other private alternatives.
Founded in 2008 by Gabriel Weinberg, DuckDuckGo is based in Paoli, Pennsylvania rather than Silicon Valley. The site, which does not track user data, now handles some 3bn searches a year - although that is only about the same volume that Google processes in 24 hours. Since last year, it has been a built-in search option in both Safari and Firefox. The site also promises to provide the information users want with fewer clicks through features such as instant answers, themes and !bangs. DuckDuckGo hopes these other features will help it continue to build on the audience gained from people looking for more private ways to search the web following the Snowden revelations.
Founded in 2008 by Gabriel Weinberg, DuckDuckGo is based in Paoli, Pennsylvania rather than Silicon Valley. The site, which does not track user data, now handles some 3bn searches a year - although that is only about the same volume that Google processes in 24 hours. Since last year, it has been a built-in search option in both Safari and Firefox. The site also promises to provide the information users want with fewer clicks through features such as instant answers, themes and !bangs. DuckDuckGo hopes these other features will help it continue to build on the audience gained from people looking for more private ways to search the web following the Snowden revelations.
Meanwhile, the smaller guys actually return better search results, and have innovative ideas that are quite useful. Years ago, I switched to Clusty because the automatic categories listed in the sidebar made it extremely easy to narrow down searches with a click. DDG does a watered-down version of that, but also has often-useful instant answers at the top, so you don't have to click-through to anything at all. Clusty got worse, and got bought-out by some religious-right group. DDG continues to returns better search results, in part because it more aggressively filters out spammy sites that flood Google.
I will be eternally grateful to Google for massively improving on the worthless mess that was search engines. They single-handedly took the internet out of the cesspool, where searching for articles on Rhinos turned up porn and warez sites at the top of the list... But Google has been going in the wrong direction since then, and others have taken-up the torch and run with it.