Mention DuckDuckGo, and the chances are that someone will talk about privacy. After all, it’s the high-relevance search engine that doesn’t store your personal information, your IP address or your search history. Yet, according to a recent TIME interview with Gabriel Weinberg, founder of DuckDuckGo, that wasn’t the point of this up-and-coming alternative to Google – it was simply intended as a “spam-free” zone at a time when the Big G and all around it were being SEO’d to death.
In 2008, when Weinberg revealed his new baby to the world on TechCrunch’s Elevator Pitch, the cat-friendly serial entrepreneur was at pains to remind viewers of the hand-picked, “human-powered” nature of DuckDuckGo’s results. Suggesting that users should think of DuckDuckGo as “Google-plus,” Weinberger inadvertently anticipated, in name at least, one of his giant rival’s future features – one that today he would likely consider to be self-promoting spam.
In the search engine wars, DuckDuckGo is one of two relative newcomers – Blekko being the other– that have seen rapid growth since the start of 2012. Despite pages of informed comment, the causes of this trend are still a matter for debate. Nevertheless, many search professionals take the view that Panda and over-optimization penalties have provoked an anti-Google sentiment that is benefitting the little guys, as a recent piece from The Atlantic suggests.
So what should users expect from DuckDuckGo? Weinberg has an almost evangelical approach to providing you with the most relevant results to your search query in the fewest number of clicks. Search Engine Land, examining what it calls the “Searcher Work Quotient,” runs through several scenarios that showcase DuckDuckGo’s ability to cut to the chase without frills. From the examples shown, the article concludes that DuckDuckGo is “capitalizing on areas where Google remains weak.”
For many, DuckDuckGo evokes memories of what Google used to offer – a largely uncluttered interface, easy-to-digest results that don’t have to compete with assorted advertising and a high degree of relevance. Its regular use of crowd-sourced sites, including Wikipedia, as a resource may not have the absolute authority of .gov or .edu sources, but as a means of ensuring a human-backed flavor to SERPs, it’s certainly got merit.
A recent VentureBeat article quotes Weinberg, who all but acknowledges the nature of the compromise. “While our indexes are getting bigger, we do not expect to be wholly independent from third-parties,” he confirmed, “It seems silly to compete on crawling … instead, we’ve focused on building a better search engine by concentrating on … having way more instant answers [and] way less spam.”
And privacy? In June 2011, OSNews ran a fairly heavy-duty piece on DuckDuckGo’s approach to the subject, introducing what Internet activists call “the filter bubble.” Google aficionados would recognize the “bubble” as “personalization,” or “the art showing you what we guessed you wanted to know,” a concept that Weinberg abhors. Readers with a minute or two to spare will enjoy his tongue-in-cheek take on the topic.
Should DuckDuckGo’s recent upsurge have Larry Page looking over his shoulder? “Not just yet” is the consensus view, although nobody should forget that Google was an unknown newcomer once. As long ago as 2003, Search Engine Watch took a detailed look at some of the casualties that litter the route toward today’s “Google-opoly.” Many don’t believe it could ever happen to the modern-day colossus of search, but then who today remembers Magellan or Northern Light?
