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DuckDuckGo is an American software company focused on
online privacy Internet privacy involves the right or mandate of personal privacy concerning the storage, re-purposing, provision to third parties, and display of information pertaining to oneself via the Internet. Internet privacy is a subset of data privacy. P ...
whose flagship product is a
search engine A search engine is a software system that provides hyperlinks to web pages, and other relevant information on World Wide Web, the Web in response to a user's web query, query. The user enters a query in a web browser or a mobile app, and the sea ...
named DuckDuckGo. Founded by Gabriel Weinberg in 2008, its later products include
browser extension A browser extension is a software module for customizing a web browser. Browsers typically allow users to install a variety of extensions, including user interface modifications, cookie management, ad blocking, and the custom scripting and st ...
s and a custom DuckDuckGo web browser. Headquartered in Paoli, Pennsylvania, DuckDuckGo is a
privately held company A privately held company (or simply a private company) is a company whose Stock, shares and related rights or obligations are not offered for public subscription or publicly negotiated in their respective listed markets. Instead, the Private equi ...
with about 200 employees. The company's name is a reference to the children's game duck, duck, goose.


History


Early years

DuckDuckGo was founded by Gabriel Weinberg and launched on February 29, 2008, in
Valley Forge, Pennsylvania The village of Valley Forge is an unincorporated settlement. It is located on the west side of Valley Forge National Historical Park at the confluence of Valley Creek and the Schuylkill River in Pennsylvania. The remaining village is in Schu ...
. Weinberg is an entrepreneur who previously launched Names Database, a now-defunct social network. Self-funded by Weinberg until October 2011, DuckDuckGo was then "backed by
Union Square Ventures Union Square Ventures (USV) is an American venture capital firm based in New York City. The firm has backed more than 130 startups, including Twitter, Etsy, Stripe, Coinbase, Zynga, Tumblr, Stack Overflow, Meetup, Kickstarter, MongoDB, ...
and a handful of
angel investor An angel investor (also known as a business angel, informal investor, angel funder, private investor, or seed investor) is an individual who provides capital to a business or businesses, including startups, usually in exchange for convertible de ...
s." Union Square partner Brad Burnham stated, "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." In addition, Trisquel,
Linux Mint Linux Mint is a community-developed Linux distribution. It is based on Ubuntu and designed for x86-64 based computers; another variant is based on Debian which is named Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE) and has both 64-bit and IA-32 support. T ...
, and the Midori
web browser A web browser, often shortened to browser, is an application for accessing websites. When a user requests a web page from a particular website, the browser retrieves its files from a web server and then displays the page on the user's scr ...
switched to use DuckDuckGo as their default search engine. DuckDuckGo gains revenue via advertisements and affiliate programs. The
search engine A search engine is a software system that provides hyperlinks to web pages, and other relevant information on World Wide Web, the Web in response to a user's web query, query. The user enters a query in a web browser or a mobile app, and the sea ...
is written in
Perl Perl is a high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming language. Though Perl is not officially an acronym, there are various backronyms in use, including "Practical Extraction and Reporting Language". Perl was developed ...
and runs on
nginx (pronounced "engine x" , stylized as NGINX or nginx) is a web server that can also be used as a reverse proxy, load balancer, mail proxy and HTTP cache. The software was created by Russian developer Igor Sysoev and publicly released in 20 ...
,
FreeBSD FreeBSD is a free-software Unix-like operating system descended from the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD). The first version was released in 1993 developed from 386BSD, one of the first fully functional and free Unix clones on affordable ...
, and
Linux Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...
. DuckDuckGo is built primarily upon search
API An application programming interface (API) is a connection between computers or between computer programs. It is a type of software interface, offering a service to other pieces of software. A document or standard that describes how to build ...
s from various vendors. Because of this,
TechCrunch TechCrunch is an American global online newspaper focusing on topics regarding high tech, high-tech and Startup company, startup companies. It was founded in June 2005 by Archimedes Ventures, led by partners Michael Arrington and Keith Teare. I ...
characterized the service as a "hybrid" search engine. Weinberg explained the beginnings of the name with respect to the children's game duck, duck, goose. He said of the origin of the name: "Really it just popped in my head one day and I just liked it. It is certainly influenced/derived from duck duck goose, but other than that there is no relation, e.g., a metaphor." DuckDuckGo was featured on TechCrunch's
Elevator Pitch An elevator pitch, elevator speech, lift speech, or elevator statement is a short description of an idea, product, or company that explains the concept in a way such that any listener can understand it in a short period of time. This description ...
Friday in 2008, and it was a finalist in the 2008 BOSS
Mashable Mashable is a Online newspaper, news website, digital media platform and entertainment company founded by Pete Cashmore in 2005. History Mashable was founded by Pete Cashmore while living in Aberdeen, Scotland, in July 2004. Early iterations o ...
Challenge. In 2010, DuckDuckGo began using privacy to differentiate itself from its competitors. In July 2010, Weinberg started a DuckDuckGo community website (duck.co) to allow the public to report problems, discuss means of spreading the use of the search engine, request features, and discuss open sourcing the code. The company registered the
domain name In the Internet, a domain name is a string that identifies a realm of administrative autonomy, authority, or control. Domain names are often used to identify services provided through the Internet, such as websites, email services, and more. ...
''ddg .gg'' on February 22, 2011, and acquired ''duck.com'' in December 2018, which are used as shortened URL aliases that redirect to ''duckduckgo.com'', and is also used as the domain for their email protection service.


Growth in the 2010s

By May 2012, the search engine was attracting 1.5 million searches a day. Weinberg reported that it had earned in revenue in 2011 and had three employees, plus a small number of contractors. Compete.com estimated 266,465 unique visitors to the site in February 2012. On April 12, 2011,
Alexa Alexa may refer to: Technology *Amazon Alexa, a virtual assistant developed by Amazon * Alexa Internet, a defunct website ranking and traffic analysis service * Alexa Fluor, a family of fluorescent dyes * Arri Alexa, a digital motion picture ca ...
reported a 3-month growth rate of 51%. DuckDuckGo's own traffic statistics show that in August 2012 there were 1,393,644 visits per day, up from an average of 39,406 visits per day in April 2010 (the earliest data available). In a lengthy profile in November 2012, ''
The Washington Post ''The Washington Post'', locally known as ''The'' ''Post'' and, informally, ''WaPo'' or ''WP'', is an American daily newspaper published in Washington, D.C., the national capital. It is the most widely circulated newspaper in the Washington m ...
'' indicated that searches on DuckDuckGo numbered up to 45,000,000 per month in October 2012. The article concluded:
"Weinberg's non-ambitious goals make him a particularly odd and dangerous competitor online. He can do almost everything that
Google Google LLC (, ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company focusing on online advertising, search engine technology, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, consumer electronics, and artificial ...
or
Bing Bing most often refers to: * Bing Crosby (1903–1977), American singer * Microsoft Bing, a web search engine Bing may also refer to: Food and drink * Bing (bread), a Chinese flatbread * Bing (soft drink), a UK brand * Bing cherry, a varie ...
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."
GNOME A gnome () is a mythological creature and diminutive spirit in Renaissance magic and alchemy, introduced by Paracelsus in the 16th century and widely adopted by authors, including those of modern fantasy literature. They are typically depict ...
released
Web Web most often refers to: * Spider web, a silken structure created by the animal * World Wide Web or the Web, an Internet-based hypertext system Web, WEB, or the Web may also refer to: Computing * WEB, a literate programming system created by ...
3.10 on September 26, 2013, and starting with this version, the default search engine is DuckDuckGo. At its keynote speech at WWDC 2014 on September 18, 2014, Apple announced that DuckDuckGo would be included as an option for search on both
iOS 8 iOS 8 is the eighth major release of the iOS mobile operating system developed by Apple Inc., being the successor to iOS 7. It was announced at the company's Worldwide Developers Conference on June 2, 2014, and was released on September 17 ...
and
OS X Yosemite OS X Yosemite ( ; version 10.10) is the eleventh major release of macOS, Apple Inc.'s desktop and server operating system for Macintosh computers. OS X Yosemite was announced and released to developers on June 2, 2014, at WWDC 2014 and re ...
in its
Safari A safari (; originally ) is an overland journey to observe wildlife, wild animals, especially in East Africa. The so-called big five game, "Big Five" game animals of Africa – lion, African leopard, leopard, rhinoceros, African elephant, elep ...
browser. On March 10, the
Pale Moon Pale Moon is a free and open-source web browser licensed under the MPL-2.0 with an emphasis on customization. There are official releases for Microsoft Windows, FreeBSD, macOS, and Linux. Pale Moon originated as a fork of Firefox, but has subs ...
web browser, starting with version 24.4.0, included DuckDuckGo as its default search engine, as well as listed it on the browser's homepage. In May 2014, DuckDuckGo released a redesigned version to beta testers through DuckDuckHack. On May 21, 2014, DuckDuckGo officially released the redesigned version that focused on smarter answers and a more refined look. The new version added many new features such as images, local search, auto-suggest, weather, recipes, and more. On November 10, 2014,
Mozilla Mozilla is a free software community founded in 1998 by members of Netscape. The Mozilla community uses, develops, publishes and supports Mozilla products, thereby promoting free software and open standards. The community is supported institution ...
added DuckDuckGo as a search option to Firefox 33.1. On May 30, 2016, The Tor Project, Inc made DuckDuckGo the default search engine for Tor Browser 6.0. In July 2016, DuckDuckGo officially announced the extension of its partnership with
Yahoo! Yahoo (, styled yahoo''!'' in its logo) is an American web portal that provides the search engine Yahoo Search and related services including My Yahoo, Yahoo Mail, Yahoo News, Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Sports, y!entertainment, yahoo!life, and its a ...
that brought new features to all users of the search engine, including date filtering of results and additional site links. It also partners with
Bing Bing most often refers to: * Bing Crosby (1903–1977), American singer * Microsoft Bing, a web search engine Bing may also refer to: Food and drink * Bing (bread), a Chinese flatbread * Bing (soft drink), a UK brand * Bing cherry, a varie ...
,
Yandex Yandex LLC ( rus, Яндекс, r=Yandeks, p=ˈjandəks) is a Russian technology company that provides Internet-related products and services including a web browser, search engine, cloud computing, web mapping, online food ordering, streaming ...
, and Wikipedia to produce results or make use of features offered. The company also confirmed that it does not share user information with partner companies, as has always been its policy. In December 2018, it was reported that Google transferred ownership of the domain name Duck.com to DuckDuckGo. It is not known what price, if any, DuckDuckGo paid for the domain name. On January 15, 2019, DuckDuckGo announced that all map and address-related searches would be powered by
Apple Maps Apple Maps is a web mapping service developed by Apple Inc. As the default map system of iOS, iPadOS, macOS, tvOS, visionOS, and watchOS, it provides directions and estimated times of arrival for driving, walking, cycling, and public trans ...
, both on
desktop A desktop traditionally refers to: * The surface of a desk (often to distinguish office appliances that fit on a desk, such as photocopiers and printers, from larger equipment covering its own area on the floor) Desktop may refer to various compu ...
and
mobile device A mobile device or handheld device is a computer small enough to hold and operate in hand. Mobile devices are typically battery-powered and possess a flat-panel display and one or more built-in input devices, such as a touchscreen or keypad. ...
s. In March 2019, Google added DuckDuckGo to the default search engine list in Chrome 73. Beginning in 2018, the company has offered
browser extension A browser extension is a software module for customizing a web browser. Browsers typically allow users to install a variety of extensions, including user interface modifications, cookie management, ad blocking, and the custom scripting and st ...
s for popular
web browser A web browser, often shortened to browser, is an application for accessing websites. When a user requests a web page from a particular website, the browser retrieves its files from a web server and then displays the page on the user's scr ...
s (
Google Chrome Google Chrome is a web browser developed by Google. It was first released in 2008 for Microsoft Windows, built with free software components from Apple WebKit and Mozilla Firefox. Versions were later released for Linux, macOS, iOS, iPadOS, an ...
,
Safari A safari (; originally ) is an overland journey to observe wildlife, wild animals, especially in East Africa. The so-called big five game, "Big Five" game animals of Africa – lion, African leopard, leopard, rhinoceros, African elephant, elep ...
, and others). The company also launched its own web browser, called the DuckDuckGo Private Browser. Both of these products have protections against
web tracking Web tracking is the practice by which operators of websites and third parties collect, store and share information about visitors' activities on the World Wide Web. Analysis of a user's behaviour may be used to provide content that enables the op ...
and other privacy intrusions for all web browsing (not limited to DuckDuckGo searches). Prior to August 2022, DuckDuckGo Private Browser did not block Microsoft tracking scripts.


2020s

In July 2021, DuckDuckGo introduced its
email forwarding Email forwarding generically refers to the operation of re-sending a previously delivered email to an email address to one or more different email addresses. The term ''forwarding'', used for mail since long before electronic communications, has n ...
feature Email Protection, which lets users claim an "@duck.com" email address generated by the service. That inbox will receive emails and strip them of data trackers before forwarding them to the user's private email address. The feature launched in beta for users of DuckDuckGo Private Browser on iOS and Android. , DuckDuckGo handled 102,704,358 daily searches on average. Also in April, DuckDuckGo said that they would protect users from being tracked by Google's Accelerated Mobile Pages framework, stating: "When you load or share a Google AMP page anywhere from DuckDuckGo apps (
iOS Ios, Io or Nio (, ; ; locally Nios, Νιός) is a Greek island in the Cyclades group in the Aegean Sea. Ios is a hilly island with cliffs down to the sea on most sides. It is situated halfway between Naxos and Santorini. It is about long an ...
/ Android/
Mac Mac or MAC may refer to: Common meanings * Mac (computer), a line of personal computers made by Apple Inc. * Mackintosh, a raincoat made of rubberized cloth * Mac, a prefix to surnames derived from Gaelic languages * McIntosh (apple), a Canadi ...
) or extensions (
Firefox Mozilla Firefox, or simply Firefox, is a free and open-source web browser developed by the Mozilla Foundation and its subsidiary, the Mozilla Corporation. It uses the Gecko rendering engine to display web pages, which implements curr ...
/ Chrome), the original publisher's webpage will be used in place of the Google AMP version". In September 2022,
Debian Debian () is a free and open-source software, free and open source Linux distribution, developed by the Debian Project, which was established by Ian Murdock in August 1993. Debian is one of the oldest operating systems based on the Linux kerne ...
package maintainers switched the default search engine in
Chromium Chromium is a chemical element; it has Symbol (chemistry), symbol Cr and atomic number 24. It is the first element in Group 6 element, group 6. It is a steely-grey, Luster (mineralogy), lustrous, hard, and brittle transition metal. Chromium ...
to DuckDuckGo for privacy reasons. In April 2024, DuckDuckGo introduced Privacy Pro, a paid subscription that includes a
VPN Virtual private network (VPN) is a network architecture for virtually extending a private network (i.e. any computer network which is not the public Internet) across one or multiple other networks which are either untrusted (as they are not c ...
, Personal Information Removal, and Identity Theft Restoration. The subscription launched to users of the DuckDuckGo browser in the United States.


Features


Privacy

DuckDuckGo does not track its users. DuckDuckGo keeps
favicon A favicon (; short for favorite icon), also known as a shortcut icon, website icon, tab icon, URL icon, or bookmark icon, is a file containing one or more small icons associated with a particular website or web page. A web designer can create s ...
s anonymous. User locations are never sent to DuckDuckGo servers, even when they allow a third party to collect their geolocations. DuckDuckGo offers limited third-party tracking protection, third-party cookie protection, CNAME cloaking protection, limited device
fingerprint A fingerprint is an impression left by the friction ridges of a human finger. The recovery of partial fingerprints from a crime scene is an important method of forensic science. Moisture and grease on a finger result in fingerprints on surfa ...
protection from third parties, link tracking removal, Google AMP replacement, and do-not-track requests.


Search results

DuckDuckGo's results are a compilation of "over 400" sources according to itself, including Bing, Yahoo! Search BOSS,
Wolfram Alpha WolframAlpha ( ) is an answer engine developed by Wolfram Research. It is offered as an online service that answers factual queries by computing answers from externally sourced data. History Launch preparations for WolframAlpha began on Ma ...
, Yandex, and its own
web crawler Web crawler, sometimes called a spider or spiderbot and often shortened to crawler, is an Internet bot that systematically browses the World Wide Web and that is typically operated by search engines for the purpose of Web indexing (''web spider ...
(the DuckDuckBot); but none from Google. It also uses data from
crowdsourced Crowdsourcing involves a large group of dispersed participants contributing or producing goods or services—including ideas, votes, micro-tasks, and finances—for payment or as volunteers. Contemporary crowdsourcing often involves digit ...
sites such as
Wikipedia Wikipedia is a free content, free Online content, online encyclopedia that is written and maintained by a community of volunteers, known as Wikipedians, through open collaboration and the wiki software MediaWiki. Founded by Jimmy Wales and La ...
, to populate knowledge panel boxes to the right of the search results. During a Bing API outage in 2024, DuckDuckGo stopped showing results, indicating that Bing provided a substantial portion of DuckDuckGo's results. DuckDuckGo offers ''HTML'' and ''lite'' versions of its search for browsers without
JavaScript JavaScript (), often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language and core technology of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. Ninety-nine percent of websites use JavaScript on the client side for webpage behavior. Web browsers have ...
capabilities. DuckDuckGo has refined the quality of its search engine results by deleting search results for companies they believe are content mills, such as
eHow eHow is an online how-to guide with many articles and 170,000 videos offering step-by-step instructions. eHow articles and videos are created by freelancers and cover a wide variety of topics organized into a hierarchy of categories. Any eHow ...
, which publishes 4,000 articles per day produced by paid freelance writers, which Weinberg states to be "low-quality content designed specifically to rank highly in Google's search index". DuckDuckGo also filters pages with substantial advertising. DuckDuckGo down ranks websites deemed to have low journalistic standards.


Instant Answers

In addition to the indexed search results, DuckDuckGo displays relevant results, called instant answers, on top of the search page. These Instant Answers are collected from either third party APIs or static data sources like text files. The Instant Answers are called ''zeroclickinfo'' because the intention behind these is to provide what users are searching for on the search result page itself so that they do not have to click any results to find what they are looking for. Instant answers are created by and maintained by a community of over 1,500 open source contributors. This community has come to be known as DuckDuckHack. , there were 1,236 Instant Answers active. In the DuckDuckHack documentation, four types of Instant Answers are described: ''Goodies, Spices, Fatheads,'' and ''Longtails''. These types of Instant Answer extensions are differentiated by how their data is retrieved. Goodies do not retrieve data from a third party API, whereas Spices do. Goodies instead use some form of the aforementioned static data sources, such as text files or
JSON JSON (JavaScript Object Notation, pronounced or ) is an open standard file format and electronic data interchange, data interchange format that uses Human-readable medium and data, human-readable text to store and transmit data objects consi ...
files. Fathead Instant Answers are key-value answers hosted on DuckDuckGo's backend. Fathead key-value pairs function similarly to a trigger for showing the respective Instant Answer. Longtail Instant Answers are full text queries to a DuckDuckGo database of articles. Paragraphs or snippets from any matching articles are returned, and the section that matches the user's query is highlighted. In March 2023, DuckDuckGo added DuckAssist to Instant Answers. Using
large language model A large language model (LLM) is a language model trained with self-supervised machine learning on a vast amount of text, designed for natural language processing tasks, especially language generation. The largest and most capable LLMs are g ...
s from
OpenAI OpenAI, Inc. is an American artificial intelligence (AI) organization founded in December 2015 and headquartered in San Francisco, California. It aims to develop "safe and beneficial" artificial general intelligence (AGI), which it defines ...
and
Anthropic Anthropic PBC is an American artificial intelligence (AI) startup company founded in 2021. Anthropic has developed a family of large language models (LLMs) named Claude as a competitor to OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini. According to the ...
, DuckAssist generates answers to users' questions by scanning online encyclopedias (like Wikipedia and Britannica).


Tor access

In August 2010, DuckDuckGo introduced anonymous searching, including an exit enclave, for its search engine traffic using Tor network and enabling access through a "Tor hidden service" ( onion service). '(deprecated) was the DuckDuckGo v2 onion service on 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 DDG, 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 July 2021, DuckDuckGo introduced a new v3 onion service, with a new link: '.


Bangs

DuckDuckGo includes "!Bang" keywords, which give users the ability to search on specific third-party websites – using the site's own search engine if applicable. As of August 2020, 13,564 "bangs" for a diverse range of internet sites are available. In December 2018, around 2,000 "bangs" were deleted. Some of them were deleted due to being broken, while others, such as searches of pirated content sites, were deleted for liability reasons.


Business model

DuckDuckGo earns revenue by serving ads primarily from the Yahoo-Bing search alliance network. As a privacy-focused search engine, the ads served on DuckDuckGo are based on keywords and terms of the search query. As of April 2024, DuckDuckGo also makes money from subscription fees paid to access Privacy Pro.


Donations

The company supports charitable organizations that work to improve privacy; in 2021 they donated
US$ The United States dollar (Currency symbol, symbol: Dollar sign, $; ISO 4217, currency code: USD) is the official currency of the United States and International use of the U.S. dollar, several other countries. The Coinage Act of 1792 introdu ...
1 million to these causes and had donated $3,650,000 over the previous decade. Major donations for 2021 included $200,000 to the Center for Information Technology Policy, $150,000 to the
Electronic Frontier Foundation The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is an American international non-profit digital rights group based in San Francisco, California. It was founded in 1990 to promote Internet civil liberties. It provides funds for legal defense in court, ...
, $75,000 to European Digital Rights (EDRi) and $75,000 to
The Markup ''The Markup'' is an American nonprofit news publication focused on the impact of technology on society. Founded in 2018 with the goal of advancing data-driven journalism, the publication launched in February 2020. Nabiha Syed is the current ...
.


Source code

Some of DuckDuckGo's
source code In computing, source code, or simply code or source, is a plain text computer program written in a programming language. A programmer writes the human readable source code to control the behavior of a computer. Since a computer, at base, only ...
is
free and open-source software Free and open-source software (FOSS) is software available under a license that grants users the right to use, modify, and distribute the software modified or not to everyone free of charge. FOSS is an inclusive umbrella term encompassing free ...
hosted at
GitHub GitHub () is a Proprietary software, proprietary developer platform that allows developers to create, store, manage, and share their code. It uses Git to provide distributed version control and GitHub itself provides access control, bug trackin ...
under the Apache 2.0 License, but the core is
proprietary {{Short pages monitor