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DuckDuckGo Is Giving Away $225,000 To Support Open Source Projects (businessinsider.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Google Search competitor DuckDuckGo announced it will be giving away a total of $225,000 to support nine open source projects, each project will receive $25,000. DuckDuckGo said it performed 3 billion searches in 2015. It differs from many other search engines as it offers private, anonymous internet search. It doesn't gather information about you to sell ads to marketeers, like Google. Instead, it shows generic ads as it's part of the Microsoft/Bing/Yahoo ad network. It also has revenue-sharing agreements with certain companies in the Linux Open Source worlds, and makes money from select affiliate links. The $225,000 DuckDuckGo is giving away is chump change compared to the $100 million Google gives away in grants ever year. However, for the select projects, it should still be very beneficial. Last year, DuckDuckGo gave away a total of $125,000 to open source projects, so it's nice to see them donate an extra $100,000 to a good cause.
they have ads, but i suspect the average user of ddg is more inclined to have an adblocker than the average flock-following user of google or huh-i-can-change-the-default? bing user.
more importantly.. we don't really know who or what ddg is... who backs it, and whether or not they're in bed with various 3 and 4 letter acronyms.
and finally, do we really know ddg founder gabriel weinberg? can we really, truly trust someone who made his millions by collecting and then profiting off personal information of others? (optobox/names database sold to classmates.com in '06)
Depends. For generic, English searches, it works. For specialized technical searches or other languages, I still have to go back to Google from time to time.