DuckDuckGo

DuckDuckGo is an internet search engine company based in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, founded by Gabriel Weinberg in 2008. Its core proposition is “privacy first”, and it promises not to monitor or record users’ searches and not to use cookies. DuckDuckGo emphasizes the protection of user privacy, does not collect personal information, and does not conduct targeted advertising.

DuckDuckGo’s search engine is written in Perl and runs on nginx, providing a variety of privacy protections such as forced HTTPS connections, blocking trackers, ad blocking, etc. In addition, DuckDuckGo encourages users to use Firefox’s mandatory HTTPS extension and the Tor anonymity network to further enhance privacy protection.

In terms of market performance, DuckDuckGo processes about 3 billion search queries per month, accounting for 0.54% of the global search engine market and 1.96% of the US market. Despite Google’s dominance in the global market, DuckDuckGo is still seen as an alternative to Google for privacy protection users.

DuckDuckGo also offers browser extensions and mobile apps that support iOS and Android platforms. The privacy browser iPhone version was downloaded more than 500,000 times in April 2024, and the Android version was downloaded more than 1 million times, for a total of more than 50 million downloads. Additionally, DuckDuckGo’s Chrome extension has more than 5 million users.

DuckDuckGo’s business model relies heavily on sponsored advertising and affiliate marketing, while respecting core principles of user privacy. The company has been profitable since 2014, generating revenue from private search ads that are based solely on the pages of search results users view, rather than on the identities assumed by other companies and tracking algorithms.

It is worth noting that since September 2014, DuckDuckGo has encountered technical problems in the Chinese mainland and cannot be accessed normally, which may be related to Google’s crackdown. Despite this, DuckDuckGo has attracted attention for its privacy protection and unique user experience, and has promoted privacy control standards globally.