DuckDuckGo

DuckDuckGo is an American software company focused on online privacy whose flagship product is a search engine named DuckDuckGo. Founded by Gabriel Weinberg in 2008, its later products include browser extensions and a custom DuckDuckGo web browser. Headquartered in Paoli, Pennsylvania, DuckDuckGo is a privately held company 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. 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 and a handful of angel investors." 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, and the Midori web browser switched to use DuckDuckGo as their default search engine. DuckDuckGo gains revenue via advertisements and affiliate programs. The search engine is written in Perl and runs on nginx, FreeBSD, and Linux. DuckDuckGo is built primarily upon search APIs from various vendors. Because of this, TechCrunch 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 Friday in 2008, and it was a finalist in the 2008 BOSS Mashable 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 ''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 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'' 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 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."

GNOME released Web 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 and OS X Yosemite in its Safari browser. On March 10, the Pale Moon 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 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! 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, Yandex, 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, both on desktop and mobile devices.

In March 2019, Google added DuckDuckGo to the default search engine list in Chrome 73.

Beginning in 2018, the company has offered browser extensions for popular web browsers (Google Chrome, Safari, and others). The company also launched its own web browser, called the DuckDuckGo Private Browser. Both of these products have protections against web tracking 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 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/ Android/Mac) or extensions (Firefox/ Chrome), the original publisher's webpage will be used in place of the Google AMP version".

In September 2022, Debian package maintainers switched the default search engine in Chromium to DuckDuckGo for privacy reasons.

In April 2024, DuckDuckGo introduced Privacy Pro, a paid subscription that includes a VPN, 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 favicons 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 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, Yandex, and its own web crawler (the DuckDuckBot); but none from Google. It also uses data from crowdsourced sites such as Wikipedia, 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 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, 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 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 models from OpenAI and Anthropic, 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$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, $75,000 to European Digital Rights (EDRi) and $75,000 to The Markup.

Source code

Some of DuckDuckGo's source code is free and open-source software hosted at GitHub under the Apache 2.0 License, but the core is proprietary