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.

Comments

But where's the share buttons?

[Anonymous Coward]

But will they add convenient share buttons for all the social media sites? As Dice Holdings, Incorporated has shown us, that is what makes a website great.

Good for them!

[s.petry]

I changed several browsers to use DDG as the default search. If I can't find something, I can always to go Google.com and look for it.

Hey Dice, pay close attention to this part! I don't want to have everything I do tracked and analyzed. Not by a Government nor by a company. They don't have my best interests in mind, they have _their_ best interests in mind.

I block a lot of content today that 5 years ago I never had to worry about. I'm blocking 3 sites that Dice attempts to push through their default content because two of them are under the same owner.. a former Israeli Intel head who opened social media and content sharing sites.. out of the goodness of their hearts right? Pfffft..

Using "Social Media" only increases people's ability to track. Like the new shitty "share" button where "comment" use to be. I refuse to use social media sites for the same reason I am using DDG.

Re:Good for them!

[Anubis IV]

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.

Re:Good for them!

[TheGratefulNet]

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).

Umm, bullshit.

[Lunix Nutcase]

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.

Re:Ha?

[Excelcia]

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.

Who's behind DDG?

[Applehu Akbar]

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?

Re:Who's behind DDG?

[Anubis IV]

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.

Re:Who's behind DDG?

[jdavidb]

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

Re:Take that Google...

[Anonymous Coward]

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>

startpage

[markdavis]

>"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/...

Re:Should we trust Apple?

[swillden]

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.