“Speaking in an interview with CNBC, DuckDuckGo CEO Gabe Weinberg said that the company’s traffic has grown 600 percent over the past two years,” Chance Miller reports for 9to5Mac.
“A variety of factors likely played a role in this explosion of growth, but it is mainly attributable to the NSA’s surveillance program, which was revealed two years ago, and Apple adding it as a default search option with iOS 8 and Safari 7.1 on the Mac,” Miller reports. “With iOS 8, Apple added the option for users to choose DuckDuckGo as their default search engine within the operating system. Weinberg explained that this, coupled with increased privacy concerns, has led to extraordinary growth for his company.”
“DuckDuckGo heavily touts the fact that it doesn’t track the information of users and is a privacy-focused company,” Miller reports. “Weinberg says that DuckDuckGo is currently doing three billion searches a year. When asked how DuckDuckGo makes money without any sort of personalized search, Weinberg explained that the company simply uses keyword advertising. For instance, if you search for “car,” you’ll see ads relating to cars. Weinberg says that there isn’t a big enough difference between the revenue DuckDuckGo would make by tracking users compared to keyword advertising to justify the method.”
Read more, and see the video, in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: If you haven’t already, give DuckDuckGo a try!
And visit the Apple-backed reformgovernmentsurveillance.com today.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Readers “Dan K.,” Lynn Weiler,” and “Albert P.” for the heads up.]