DuckDuckGo

DuckDuckGo is an American company that focuses on protecting people's privacy online. Its main product is a search engine that has been praised by those who care about privacy. The company has also created browser add-ons and its own DuckDuckGo web browser.

DuckDuckGo
डकडकगो

Type of site	Search engine
Available in	Multilingual
Headquarters	20 Paoli Pike, Paoli, Pennsylvania, United States
Area served	Worldwide, except for Indonesia
Owner	Duck Duck Go, Inc.
Founder(s)	Gabriel Weinberg
CEO	Gabriel Weinberg
Key people	Steve Fishcher (CBO)
Website	duckduckgo.com
Commercial	Yes
Registration	None
Launched	September 25, 2008 (2008-09-25)
Current status	Active
Written in	Perl, JavaScript, Python

DuckDuckGo is based in Paoli, Pennsylvania, and is a private company with around 200 employees. The name of the company is a reference to the children's game "duck, duck, goose."

History

begining years

DuckDuckGo was started by an American businessman named Gabriel Weinberg. He launched the company on February 29, 2008, in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. Weinberg had previously created a social network called Names Database, which is no longer active.

Initially, Weinberg funded DuckDuckGo himself, but in October 2011, the company received investment from Union Square Ventures and some other investors. Union Square partner Brad Burnham said they invested in DuckDuckGo because they believed it was time to change the way search engines compete.

Some other organizations, like Trisquel, Linux Mint, and the Midori web browser, have started using DuckDuckGo as their default search engine. DuckDuckGo earns money through advertisements and affiliate programs.

The search engine is written in the Perl programming language and runs on nginx, FreeBSD, and Linux. It uses search APIs from various providers, which is why it is considered a "hybrid" search engine.

Weinberg explained that the name "DuckDuckGo" was inspired by the children's game "duck, duck, goose," but there is no deeper meaning behind it. The company was featured on TechCrunch's Elevator Pitch Friday in 2008 and was a finalist in the 2008 BOSS Mashable Challenge.

In 2010, DuckDuckGo started focusing on privacy as a way to make itself different from other search engines.

That year, Weinberg created a website called duck.co, where the public could report issues, discuss ways to increase the use of the search engine, request new features, and talk about making the code open-source.

In February 2011, the company registered the domain name ddg.gg, and in December 2018, they acquired the domain duck.com. These are used as shorter web addresses that redirect to the main DuckDuckGo website, duckduckgo.com. The duck.com domain is also used for their email privacy service.

Features

Search results

According to DuckDuckGo, their search results are compiled from over 400 different sources, including Bing, Yahoo Search, Wolfram Alpha, Yandex, and their own web crawler called DuckDuckBot. However, they do not use any data from Google.

DuckDuckGo also uses information from crowdsourced sites like Wikipedia to display knowledge panels alongside the search results.

Additionally, the company offers a Lite version of their search engine for browsers that don't have JavaScript capabilities.

Weinberg has worked on improving the quality of the search results by removing content from what he considers to be "content mills" - websites like eHow that publish a large number of articles written by freelance writers, which he believes are low-quality and designed to rank highly on Google.

DuckDuckGo also filters out pages with a lot of advertising and downranks websites that they consider to have low journalistic standards.

Instant Answers

In addition to the regular search results, DuckDuckGo also displays relevant information called "instant answers" at the top of the search page. These instant answers are collected from third-party APIs or their own data sources like text files.

The goal of these instant answers is to provide users with the information they're looking for directly on the search page, so they don't have to click on any links to find what they need. These instant answers are created and maintained by a community of over 1,500 open-source contributors, known as DuckDuckHack.

As of July 2019, there were 1,236 active instant answers on DuckDuckGo. These instant answers are categorized into four types: Goodies, Spices, Fatheads, and Longtails. The difference between these types is in how the data is retrieved.

Goodies use static data sources like text or JSON files, while Spices retrieve data from third-party APIs. Fatheads are key-value pairs hosted on DuckDuckGo's own servers, and Longtails are full-text queries to a DuckDuckGo database of articles, with relevant snippets highlighted.

In March 2023, DuckDuckGo added a new feature called DuckAssist, which uses large language models from OpenAI and Anthropic to generate answers to users' questions by scanning online encyclopedias like Wikipedia and Britannica.

Bangs

DuckDuckGo has a feature called "!Bang" keywords that allow users to search directly on specific third-party websites, using the site's own search engine if available. As of August 2020, there were 13,564 of these "bangs" available for a wide range of websites.

In December 2018, around 2,000 of these "bangs" were removed. Some were deleted because they were no longer working, while others, like those for websites offering pirated content, were removed for legal reasons.

This "!Bang" feature gives DuckDuckGo users the ability to quickly access and search on their desired websites directly from the DuckDuckGo search engine, without having to visit the site first.

Privacy 🔒

DuckDuckGo is committed to protecting the privacy of its users. It does not track or collect any information about the people who use its search engine.

The company also keeps the favicons (small website icons) anonymous, so they can't be used to identify users. Even if a user's location is being tracked by a third-party, DuckDuckGo will not send that information to its own servers.

DuckDuckGo offers several features to limit third-party tracking and protect user privacy. This includes blocking third-party cookies, hiding CNAME cloaking (a technique used to track users), and removing link tracking. It also replaces Google AMP pages with regular web pages to prevent tracking, and sends "do-not-track" requests to websites.

Overall, DuckDuckGo is focused on giving its users a private and secure search experience, without compromising their personal information.

Business model

DuckDuckGo makes money by showing advertisements on its search engine. These ads come from the Yahoo-Bing search network. Since DuckDuckGo is focused on privacy, the ads are based on the keywords and terms used in the search query, rather than tracking user data.

In addition to the ad revenue, as of April 2024, DuckDuckGo also earns money from subscription fees paid by users to access its Privacy Pro service. This service likely provides additional privacy features or tools beyond the basic search engine.

So in summary, DuckDuckGo's main sources of revenue are the ads it displays, which are tailored to the search terms, and the subscription fees for its premium Privacy Pro offering.

Donations

DuckDuckGo is committed to supporting organizations that work to protect people's privacy. In 2021, the company donated $1 million to these kinds of causes. Over the previous 10 years, they had donated a total of $3.65 million.

Some of the major donations made by DuckDuckGo in 2021 include: - $200,000 to the Center for Information Technology Policy - $150,000 to the Electronic Frontier Foundation - $75,000 to European Digital Rights (EDRi) - $75,000 to The Markup

By providing these significant financial contributions, DuckDuckGo is helping to fund the important work done by these privacy-focused organizations and initiatives.