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More People Than Ever Are Using DuckDuckGo; Site Says It Observed 14M Searches in One Day This Month (betanews.com)

Posted by msmash on from the affinity-for-privacy dept.

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.

3 of 210 comments (clear)

  1. Until the money runs out... by wbr1 · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Caveat.. I do not know how DDG is funded. That said, serving that much traffic COSTS. The data they could collect has value. It is likely only a matter of time until one of the following:

    1. Company folds due to lack of funds
    2. Company sells or reorganizes to collect funds and starts divulging user data to do so.
    3. Governments come in and either silently snoop or shut them down.M

    Yeah, I am a cynic and have little faith in humanity. Sorry.

    --
    Silence is a state of mime.
    1. Re:Until the money runs out... by Pascoea · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Affiliate relationships with several companies

      That's a pretty vague statement. I don't claim to know anything about DDG, or how they are funded, but that statement to me smells a lot like what Parent Post is concerned about. When your only product is data about what your customers are searching for, what do these "affiliates" have to gain by giving DDG money? Unless these affiliates are just handing over cash, without expecting anything in return.

  2. Re:For comparison by Voyager529 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I'm unfortunately in the same boat, but I think it does also depend on what you're looking for. I'd wager that if a lot of people had their default search engine changed to DDG, they'd probably fine. Let's be real, "facebook" and "facebook.com" are very common searches because most people have forgotten the distinction between a search bar and an address bar, so typing URLs in a Google/MSN search is probably a solid third of their traffic. DDG would probably be just fine for this sort of thing; people sure didn't notice when their default search got changed to Trivoli or the dozen other browser hijackers that were making their rounds a few years ago.

    Where DDG comes up very short, however, is in more specialized searches. If you're looking for a code snippet or an outdated version of some app or something more specific and technical, DDG is a crapshoot at best and useless at worst. I mean, I can't really blame them - Bing is still inferior at this point and they have thrown Microsoft quantities of money at the problem. Search is hard - there was a decade prior to Google where Altavista and Lycos were doing their best with plenty of money and lots of talent, and they were still beaten by Google.

    Ironically, DDG might get better relative to Google because Google results have continued their downward spiral toward the lowest common denominator. Just yesterday, I was trying to find out if anyone else with my particular TV was able to get the Android app "AnyRemote" to send the right IR code. I went to Google to search the model number with 'anyremote', and Google seemed to thoroughly ignore the existence of 'anyremote' in my search query, instead showing me physical remote controls, even when I put anyremote in quotes.

    If Google continues this behavior, it's only a matter of time before they end up snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, giving DDG inroads to increase their market share. The ultimate question is, however, whether the revenue they get while retaining their staunch privacy directives is enough to keep them profitable, or if they will have to compromise their privacy policy, be bought out by someone who does not share their values, or make some other rough choices to keep themselves afloat.