What is DuckDuckGo?

You heard right – DuckDuckGo! We are not talking about the childhood game you play in a circle, we’re talking about a search engine that has just surpassed 10 billion searches, with 4 billion of those happening in 2016 alone.

We have all heard of Google, Bing and Yahoo right? One search engine that has been slowly building an audience, that you may not be aware of, is DuckDuckGo.

Recently they’ve gained a lot of traction and market share. Here’s a snap shot of what that looks like:

One important and appealing point of difference for DuckDuckGo is the search engine does not retain any personal information of it’s users – in essence it’s a private search engine!

Search history and IP addresses are not collected, nor any other information such as content or behaviour patterns. Instead, the new search engine allows searchers to reduce their digital footprint online, which more and more people are finding important these days with the recent scares and articles on personal privacy. You would probably find Snowden’s search engine of choice is DuckDuckGo.

Gabriel Weinberg, CEO:

“At DuckDuckGo, our vision is to raise the standard of trust online, and in service of that vision, our mission is to be the world’s most trusted search engine,”.

So should you be worried and start taking advantage of DuckDuckGo?

We don’t think so, well not yet anyway. Retaining personal information is a way for search engines to customize experiences person to person, a way to show you more of the information that you actually care about and less of the stuff you don’t, which we think is pretty important. Google is also always improving the relevance of search results that are presented to the audience. This rewards easily accessible, quality content, websites and information.

And let’s face it, you probably haven’t heard of DuckDuckGo in New Zealand or Australia yet anyway. You certainly haven’t told a mate to “Just DuckDuckGo it” with the go to phrase still being “Google it” for the majority of people.

Definitely one worth watching for the future, seeing what DuckDuckGo’s plans are moving forward and what big moves they have in store for us next is an intriguing prospect.