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DuckDuckGo Sees Massive Growth In Post-Snowden World

Posted by Soulskill on from the gotta-be-careful-typing-that-name dept.

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.

5 of 112 comments (clear)

  1. Take that Google... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Another good private search engine is Sequoiam, no IP addresses or search history is recorded.

  2. Who's behind DDG? by Applehu+Akbar · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Do we have any independent way of verifying that DDG is not an NSA honeypot, or is this another case of Internet hipsters declaring their own set of cultural prejudices to be TRVTH because they say it is?

    1. Re:Who's behind DDG? by Anubis+IV · · Score: 4, Interesting

      There's money to be made without doing targeted advertising. You can have "dumb" ads that simply try to match the right ads with the right search terms, without regard for who the user is or what information you might be able to collect about them. Google used to operate that way, before they realized they could track users and thus charge more for their ads since they were better targeting them at specific users. DDG was founded for the sole purpose of rolling back the clock on that sort of thinking.

    2. Re:Who's behind DDG? by jdavidb · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I'm always cognizant of that. How do we know DuckDuckGo is not simply lying?

      --
      Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
  3. startpage by markdavis · · Score: 4, Interesting

    >"DuckDuckGo, the privacy-oriented search engine"

    Actually, I think of startpage.com as the privacy-oriented search engine. Same results as Google, but no Google tracking and it is NOT hosted in the USA. I have been using it for years now.

    https://classic.startpage.com/...