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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.
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.
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.