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More People Than Ever Are Using DuckDuckGo; Site Says It Observed 14M Searches in One Day This Month (betanews.com)
An anonymous reader shares a BetaNews article: A lot of people are more privacy aware than they have been in the past, and are wary of entrusting everything they search for to Google. That's where privacy-focused sites like DuckDuckGo come in. Its growth since it launched 8 years ago has been nothing short of staggering, with the number of searches skyrocketing since 2013, when Edward Snowden first revealed how the US government was spying on its people. The search site says it has to date served up over 10 billion anonymous searches, with 4 billion of those occurring in the last year alone, and the company says it is growing faster than ever. On January 10 2017, the site received in excess of 14 million private searches.
Seeing as how it just donated a quarter million to privacy sites, I would say they are OK for cash right now. (From the article above) And advertising still pays without having to need the whole pie. https://www.quora.com/How-does... (Searched for on DDG)
I do not know how DDG is funded.
DuckDuckGo earns revenue in two ways:
Serving ads from the Yahoo–Bing search alliance network, and
Affiliate relationships with several companies
For comparison purposes, Google hasn't said exactly how many searches it handles recently, but in 2012 it said it handled 1.2 trillion searches (or averaging 3.3B/day, 137M/hour, 2.2M/minute, 38k/second). It's estimated they handle over 2T per year now (5.5B/day, 228M/day, 3.8M/hour, 63K/second). So Google likely handles in 2 days what DDG has done in 8 years.
Basically the way it works is if you search and the link ends in ebay or amazon or another one of their partners, it adds something to the url like "&from=dg" . Then they get either a small amount from the click, or it saves in a cookie/hidden form field, whatever "I came from duck duck go" so that your purchase yields a small percent.
Anyone who tried to make money from their personal website in the late-90s early 2000s probably remembers this model. It's old. And doesn't track you (It doesn't include WHAT you searched for, just that you found the item and you got there from duck duck go)
When I forget the latest domain TBP had to switch to I use DDG and it finds it. Can't say the same for Goo.. *CENSORSHIP* search engine.
I decided to give DDG a try full-time as my default in the browser a while back (year or two?). DDG wasn't getting it done, however, so I would just end up back on Google. It was easy to justify since my office still uses Google docs/spreadsheets and is deeply intertwined with their products and I can't 100% escape their "Big Google" ecosystem. Besides, their results were usually superior when it came to getting me the exact results I wanted (vs. just being close) QUICKLY - so I took advantage of the saved time I'd already paid for with my privacy already.
I'm finding that more recently, however, that DDG is "good enough" in most cases. I still go back and forth because I'm too impatient, but DDG always gets the first shot - and I don't go back very often.
So, if you tried DDG in the past and found their results wanting, you should give it another try.
Even the federated model of e-mail has declined over time, with the vast majority of people using an e-mail address from a handful of large providers like GMail. Universities and companies are under pressure to have all the e-mail under their domain names actually served through GMail instead of running their own infrastructure. If you want to run your own server, there are a lot more hoops to jump through these days before you can federate, otherwise things you sent out just end up in spam folders. (These hoops are generally reasonable anti-spam ones, but they are nonetheless very different than a decade or two ago.) And now certain websites that monetize the hell out of their userbase are refusing registrations if the e-mail address you enter is from a domain that doesn't nudge its users into adopting a format like firstname.lastname@gmail.com.
No, they're selling your attention without selling your information. As they make abundantly clear in their privacy policy (that's written in refreshingly plain English by the site's founder himself, no less), they modify links to some product pages to make them into affiliate links (i.e. they get a kickback for referring you to product pages at Amazon and eBay).
Their Information Shared section is a quick read. After they explain that they don't share any info, but that you might inadvertently leak search terms to the sites you click on if you purposefully disable protections DDG enables by default, they then have this great snippet that demonstrates the sort of mindset they follow:
Also, like anyone else, we will comply with court ordered legal requests. However, in our case, we don't expect any because there is nothing useful to give them since we don't collect any personal information.
Moreover, you can disable advertising for DuckDuckGo if you want (it's a setting you can toggle). Oh, and all of those settings I'm talking about? They only ever exist client-side and aren't linked to an account or identity in any way. You either pass them in as a set or URL parameters or as a cookie that contains no identifiable information. In fact, in a quick check of the site via uMatrix (with ads disabled), it shows that 100% of the resources served are first-party, so there isn't a single external Javascript or tracking cookie being set by sleazy advertisers or people outside their control.
If you're still concerned, here are the details about how they make money, which make it abundantly clear (again, in plain English) how they make money without selling their users' information.
Honestly, if you want to complain about DDG, the biggest issue remains the quality of their results. They finally got "good enough" for me, so I switched to them about a year ago and haven't regretted it, and they've only been getting better since then (e.g. they'll oftentimes have the top-rated StackOverflow answer displayed as a pull-out at the top of the search results), but there's still room for improvement (e.g. longer search terms produce noisy results for me). That said, the fact that they offer bangs makes it drop-dead simple to deal with those situations (i.e. add "!g" to your search to Google it instead). Plus, the fact that I can set them as my default search engine in Chrome/iOS/etc. means that no matter where I am, I can just use the bangs for Amazon (!a), Wikipedia (!w), Google Maps (!gm), Rotten Tomatoes (!rt), or whatever else to immediately jump to the results at those sites, rather than having to first navigate to them.
It's a great site that's continually getting better, and I would strongly encourage others to give it a shot or try it again if it's been awhile since the last time they tried it.
uMatrix shows that 100% of the resources being loaded in a DuckDuckGo search are first-party. There are no external scripts, tracking cookies, or other cross-site references of any sort. The first-party cookies they set are opt-in, entirely optional, and contain no identifiable information. The affiliate stuff is just the Amazon and eBay affiliate programs that anyone can sign up for (i.e. they add parameters to Amazon and eBay URLs to identify DDG as the referrer, that way they get a kickback, but it can't be tied back to you or your search).
Their privacy policy is written in plain English and--particularly in the three sections about information (not) collected and shared--makes it abundantly clear that they go out of their way to avoid collecting anything remotely related to you in the first place, that way they never have to face people being concerned about the retention loopholes you're talking about. They even offer tips for how you can help prevent information leakage and point out some ways that you may leak information if you choose to disable the protections they've put in place by default.
I get the cynical attitude, but at least look into things a bit before you wantonly smear one of the few companies that's actually trying to do right by their users when it comes to privacy.
When Obama was campaigning in '07 he said he would end the spying on U.S. citizens. And have the most transparent government ever. And close Gitmo.
Two things there:
(1) Congress prevented him.
(2) Candidate Obama, once elected, adapted to fit the political reality. Candidate Trump seems so far to keep wanting to distort reality to conform to his fragile ego.
About 6 months prior to Obama's first term election, he completely flip-flopped on telecom immunity.
As a result, Obama received greater telecom campaign donations, which helped him spend more money on his campaign.
That's an example of a politician "adapting to fit political reality", and the political climate was so corrupt that your candidate felt comfortable betraying a promise several months before the election!
Framing "betraying campaign promises" as "adapting to fit the political reality" makes it seem almost... noble.
That's a loophole worth considering, to be sure, but I don't think it's actually a concern in practice, given that their Information Shared section lists the data they share (i.e. nothing) and the conditions under which they share it (i.e. only when there's a court order). Suffice to say, if they were sharing info in the manner you described, they'd be obligated to disclose it there.