The Rise of DuckDuckGo

John Paul Titlow, writing for Fast Company:

The premise of DuckDuckGo is simple: It doesn’t track your searches or any other online activity. Whereas Google has built a $66 billion dollar-a-year business around knowing more and more about its users’ every click, tap, and scroll, DuckDuckGo prefers ignorance. It doesn’t have user logins, it doesn’t log your search history or IP address. Even if they wanted to hand over data about your search history, they couldn’t. That data just doesn’t exist.

Instead of profiting from heaps of user data, DuckDuckGo has opted for a simpler business model: Old-school search ads that pair the keywords in people’s queries with relevant ads placed by the highest bidder. Weinberg says the company also makes money from affiliate links to sites like Amazon and eBay.

I’ve been using DuckDuckGo as my primary search engine in Safari for months now, and the results just keep getting better. I do have to switch to Google for some queries, but that’s happening less and less.

★ Friday, 19 June 2015