Gabriel Weinberg’s search engine “DuckDuckGo does not track users. It doesn’t generate search results based on a user’s previous interests, potentially filtering out relevant information. It is not cluttered with ads,” Michael Rosenwald reports for The Washington Post. “In many ways, DuckDuckGo is an homage the original Google — a pure search engine — and its use is soaring, with searches up from 10 million a month in October 2011 to 45 million this past October.”
“The attention to DuckDuckGo comes as U.S. and European Union officials are stepping up scrutiny into Google’s search practices, which have been criticized for unfairly elbowing out competitors’ content and results in favor of its own. Earlier this year, in a response to criticism that it was acting monopolistically, Google publicly identified DuckDuckGo as a competitor — a move that pleased and entertained Weinberg but that also reflected a bit of hyperbole about just how close DuckDuckGo is to truly competing,” Rosenwald reports. “Google processes billions of searches a day. DuckDuckGo processes millions.”
Rosenwald reports, “‘The reality in the United States is that we still really only have two search engines — Google and Bing,’ said Danny Sullivan, editor of SearchEngineLand.com. ‘I think it’s entirely unlikely that DuckDuckGo is gonna put Google on its back and crush it.’ But what if that’s not really Weinberg’s goal?”
Read more in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “sid knowles” for the heads up.]