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.
Recently I tend to use
!w (Wikipedia)
!v (DDG's video search)
!wa (WolframAlpha)
!w3s (w3schools)
I still use Google's stuff, but find it easier to use DDG's search bar, since you can just type to search & get to any of them directly (no mouse required).
!yt (for something I know is on YouTube)
!m (Google Maps, since !osm OpenStreetMap doesn't work well where I live)
!n (Google news)
!g (Google. I find plain DDG to be better than Google for most queries, but if I need the answer to a specific question that will be on an obscure forum somewhere, Google is still better at finding those).
*(!wra, !wolfram, !alpha, !walpha, !wolframalpha also search WolframaAlpha)