Slashdot Mirror


DuckDuckGo Sees Massive Growth In Post-Snowden World

DuckDuckGo, the privacy-oriented search engine, has been around for over six years. But when Edward Snowden revealed the extent of NSA surveillance in 2013, DuckDuckGo started a period of strong growth that hasn't slowed yet. The search engine has seen a 600% increase in traffic over the past two years, and they're now serving 3 billion searches a year. This shouldn't be a surprise — last month, a Pew survey found that 40% of American adults didn't want their search engine to retain information about them. But members of the general public are notoriously slow to change their privacy-related behavior. DuckDuckGo's growing popularity has led them to double their employee count since early 2014, now totaling 28 people. Their success is beginning to fuel speculation about an acquisition, with Apple's name being tossed around as a potential buyer.

9 of 112 comments (clear)

  1. Umm, bullshit. by Lunix+Nutcase · · Score: 4, Informative

    Their success is beginning to fuel speculation about an acquisition, with Apple a top contender to buy DuckDuckGo.

    Except that there is no such speculation. No where in the link does it say that there are acquisition talks. It is just someone's opinion that Apple should buy them.

  2. ddg.gg by sims+2 · · Score: 3, Informative

    Don't forget their short url ddg.gg its as easy to type as google.com or bing.com

    --
    Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
  3. Re:Good for them! by s.petry · · Score: 2, Informative

    I attempt to keep bashing to reasonable levels, so I'll give you the information and you can find things on your own. Run NoScript and load Slashdot. Note every site that attempts to talk to your browser, and start looking for company information and whois data.

    I highly recommend people run NoScript all the time. You may be surprised at who you are being connected when visiting what you believe one site and maybe an add channel. Some sites are huge balls of spaghetti serving one little meatball.

    --

    -The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.

  4. Re:Ha? by Excelcia · · Score: 5, Informative

    DuckDuckGo doesn't have a crawler. Well, they say they do, and I'm sure they have some basic crawling, but they only say that so they don't look silly for being a search engine that doesn't actually do search. They buy their results from Bing, and then do some value added stuff like munging in Wikipedia results. I doubt Apple wants to buy something that sends money to Microsoft, and they certainly won't back Google. And Apple doesn't have the expertise to build an effective search engine on their own.

  5. Re:DuckDuckGo, please don't sell. by tlhIngan · · Score: 1, Informative

    To anyone. Certainly not to anyone who's got such varied motives as Apple.

    I'm pretty sure they can't - as in if Apple bought them Google would shut it down.

    DuckDuckGo is just using Google in the end, after all. And I'm sure Google's agreements with Apple would preclude Apple from starting up a similar service using Google's search results. (Remember, Google still pays Apple a few billion dollars to be the default search engine).

    Anyhow, doesn't iOS offer DDG as a search engine option besides Google and Yahoo/Bing?

  6. Re:Take that Google... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    Sequiam also uses google apis in their search page

    "https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.11.2/jquery.min.js"

    <sarcasm>They did a great job avoiding Google!</sarcasm>

  7. Re:Good for them! by Anubis+IV · · Score: 5, Informative

    If I can't find something, I can always to go Google.com and look for it.

    DDG can even handle that part for you. Check into their bangs. They have "!g" to automatically run your search through Google for you, saving you the hassle of navigating there yourself. I miss the inline map results when searching for addresses, so I'll use a !g on those to save myself the hassle of pulling up Google Maps directly...and I just noticed they have a !gmap, so I'll likely start using that instead.

  8. Re:Good for them! by TheGratefulNet · · Score: 4, Informative

    add to that 'disconnect' as a firefox plugin. it also filters things that you don't want (stops outbound connects that don't need to be, just to read the content).

    --

    --
    "It is now safe to switch off your computer."
  9. Re:Should we trust Apple? by swillden · · Score: 4, Informative

    Fuck google's business model.

    Really? Keep in mind that without it Google search wouldn't exist... and neither would DDG, because most of DDG's sources are other engines that are also funded by advertising. Odds are that without Google's business model you'd also be seeing a lot more, and a lot more intrusive ads. You are probably too young to remember what the commercial side of the web looked like in the mid to late 90s, but I'm sure you've seen the "one weird trick" sites with pages and pages to present a small amount of content buried in mountains of ads. That was pretty much where we were headed until targeted advertising came along.

    --
    Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.