Pro-Privacy Search Engine DuckDuckGo Hits 30 Million Daily Searches, Up 50% In a Year (techcrunch.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Some nice momentum for privacy-focused search engine DuckDuckGo which has just announced it's hit 30 million daily searches a year after reaching 20 million -- a year-on-year increase of 50%. Hitting the first 10 million daily searches took the search engine a full seven years, and then it was another two to get to 20 million. So as growth curves go it must have required patience and a little faith in the run up. It also recently emerged that DDG had quietly picked up $10 million in VC funding, which is only its second tranche of external investment. The company told us this financing would be used to respond to an expanding opportunity for pro-privacy business models, including by tuning its search engine for more local markets and expanding its marketing channels to "have more of a global focus."

Comments

Privacy versus advertiser incentives

[sjbe]

Some nice momentum for privacy-focused search engine DuckDuckGo which has just announced it's hit 30 million daily searches a year after reaching 20 million -- a year-on-year increase of 50%.

To provide perspective Google does 1.2 trillion searches per day. Good progress but pretty much a rounding error compared to the big boys.

The company told us this financing would be used to respond to an expanding opportunity for pro-privacy business models, including by tuning its search engine for more local markets and expanding its marketing channels to "have more of a global focus."

Having trouble parsing this sentence. It's so vague as to be effectively meaningless.

I've seen what DuckDuckGo's business model is supposed to be and I'm rather dubious how much it can scale because advertisers and retailers don't generally give a shit about your privacy and in fact your privacy is somewhat at odds with their incentives. Furthermore Google and Bing and the others get all the network effects so advertisers and retailers aren't generally going to flock to a small search engine that isn't going to give them as much data or reach as many potential customers. If DuckDuckGo is really doing what they say they are trying to do I wish them well but it's not going to be an easy battle.

Re:Privacy versus advertiser incentives

[Ol Olsoc]

Some nice momentum for privacy-focused search engine DuckDuckGo which has just announced it's hit 30 million daily searches a year after reaching 20 million -- a year-on-year increase of 50%.

To provide perspective Google does 1.2 trillion searches per day. Good progress but pretty much a rounding error compared to the big boys.

This is a good thing.

T

I've seen what DuckDuckGo's business model is supposed to be and I'm rather dubious how much it can scale because advertisers and retailers don't generally give a shit about your privacy and in fact your privacy is somewhat at odds with their incentives. Furthermore Google and Bing and the others get all the network effects so advertisers and retailers aren't generally going to flock to a small search engine that isn't going to give them as much data or reach as many potential customers. If DuckDuckGo is really doing what they say they are trying to do I wish them well but it's not going to be an easy battle.

I dunno about you, but I much prefer to use less "popular" things in life. I prefer the National Hockey League to the NFL, and DDG to Google, both on it's privacy model, as well as knowing that huge amounts of money drive corruption. That is probably heresy in a world where Kim Kardashian is considered the best because of her gazillion Twitter followers.

And if DDG gets too big and falls to evil, I'll dump them in a New York City minute.

Re:Censorship

[ReneR]

it also feels to me that Google became worse, often when I look for open source stuff, build errors, errors, patches (for #t2sde https://t2sde.org/ I do not find much anymore, a decade ago I usually found hits on mailing lists, bug trackers, etc. Maybe Google focused more on gossip and social drama, then actual hard facts :-/

Re:Censorship

[Mashiki]

To put it simply? Google became normized, dropped functions and search options that made it popular and then started 'curating results' that it believes you should see instead of of what you're searching for. You made a point about how bad it's gotten for OS/FOSS type stuff, but it's almost impossible to find information with google for generic troubleshooting of windows codes these days. The bit about google being focused on gossip and social drama? Well probably more truth to that then we think, google wanted to be the "search page" of the internet, the first thing everyone went to for everything from email to news. They got there, and...it all went to shit.

There's an upside with this though, it's fostering competitive behavior and people are looking for other options. Now the question will be, will google try to go full walled garden when people move to other sites or try to bring people back.

Re:Thought it said Pro-Piracy

[mjwx]

I would have been up for that.

Oddly enough, that's what I use DuckDuckGo for mostly. If you're looking for a torrent it's easier to find using DDG due to the number of DMCA takedowns Google has to comply with (and I dont blame Google for that either).