- Continued from DuckDuckGo.com (Part 1 of 2) -
DuckDuckGo.com (Part 2 of 2)
The next month, Union Square Ventures invested in DDG. Union Square partner Brad Burnham made a statement that, "We invested in DuckDuckGo because we became convinced that it was not only possible to change the basis of competition in search, it was time to do it." Linux Mint signed an exclusive deal with DuckDuckGo in November and it is the default search engine for Linux Mint. Trisquel and the Midori web browser use DuckDuckGo as their default search engine.
By May 2012, the search engine was attracting 1.5 million searches a day. Weinberg reported that it had earned $115,000.00 in revenue for 2011 (US Dollars) and had three (3) employees, plus a small number of contractors.
Compete.com estimated 277,512 monthly visitors to the site in August 2012. On April 12, 2011, Alexa Internet reported a 3 month growth rate of 51%. DuckDuckGo's own traffic statistics show that in August 2012 there were about 1,393,644 visits per day, from an average of 39,406 visits per day in April 2010 (the earliest data avaliable).
In a lengthy profile in November 2012, the Washington Post indicated that searches on DuckDuckGo were up to 45,000,000 per month in October 2012. The article concluded that "Weinberg’s non-ambitious goals make him a particularly odd and dangerous competitor online. He can do almost everything that Google or Bing can’t because it could damage their business models, and if users figure out that they like the DuckDuckGo way better, Weinberg could damage the big boys without even really trying. It’s asymmetrical digital warfare, and his backers at Union Square Ventures say Google is vulnerable."
DuckDuckGo's Features:
DuckDuckGo's results are a compilation of many sources, including Yahoo! Search BOSS, Wikipedia, Wolfram Alpha and its own Web crawler, the DuckDuckBot. It uses data from crowd-sourced sites, including Wikipedia, to populate "Zero-click Info" boxes—grey boxes above the results that display topic summaries and related topics. DuckDuckGo also offers the ability to show mostly shopping sites or mostly info (non-shopping) websites via search buttons on its home page.
DuckDuckGo positions itself as a search engine that puts privacy first and as such it does not store IP addresses, does not log user information and uses cookies only when needed. Weinberg states "By default, DuckDuckGo does not collect or share personal information. That is our privacy policy in a nutshell."
Weinberg refined the quality of his search engine results by deleting search results for companies he believes are content mills, like Demand Media's eHow, which publishes 4000 articles per day produced by paid freelance writers, which Weinberg says is, "...low-quality content designed specifically to rank highly in Google's search index." DuckDuckGo also filters pages with substantial advertising.
In August 2010, DuckDuckGo introduced anonymous searching, including an exit enclave, for its search engine traffic using Tor. This allows anonymity by routing traffic through a series of encrypted relays.
Weinberg stated: "I believe this fits right in line with our privacy policy. Using Tor and DuckDuckGo, you can now be end to end anonymous with your searching. And if you use our encrypted homepage, you can be end to end encrypted as well."
In 2011, DuckDuckGo introduced voice search for users of the Google Chrome "Voice Search" extension.
DuckDuckGo also features what they call "!Bang" commands, which give users the ability to redirect a search to specific websites.
DuckDuckGo's Reception:
In a June 2011 article, Harry McCracken of Time Magazine commended DuckDuckGo, comparing it to his favorite hamburger restaurant, In-N-Out Burger, "It feels a lot like early Google, with a stripped-down home page.
Just as In-N-Out doesn't have lattes or Asian salads or sundaes or scrambled eggs, DDG doesn't try to do news or blogs or books or images. There's no auto-completion or instant results. It just offers core Web search—mostly the "ten blue links" approach that's still really useful, no matter what its critics say...As for the quality, I'm not saying that Weinberg has figured out a way to return more relevant results than Google's mighty search team. But Duck Duck Go...is really good at bringing back useful sites. It all feels meaty and straightforward and filler-free.
Thom Holwerda, who reviewed the search engine for OSNews, praised its privacy features and its shortcuts to site-specific searches as well as criticizing Google for, "...track[ing] pretty much everything you do". He also stated that he would be "unable to protect" himself if the U.S. government "subpoena'd [sic] his information".
In 2012, in response to accusations that it was a monopoly, Google identified DuckDuckGo, as a competitor. Weinberg was reportedly "pleased and entertained" by that acknowledgement.
Duck Duck Go, Inc.
Physical Address: _____________________
Paoli, Pennsylvania, USA, Zip Code or Postal Code: _____
Telephone Number: ___________________
Fax Number: ________________________
Email Address: ______________________
Website Address: http://www.DuckDuckGo.com
Link to Website:
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