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Founded in 2008, DuckDuckGo is known for its search engine. This means that it has always been defined as a challenge for Google. No comparison has been made. In 2011, Weinberg, then the company’s sole employee, posted an ad in a San Francisco ad saying, “Google is following you.” We don’t.“This brand – Google, but private – has served the company for years.
“The only way to compete with Google is not to try to compete in search results,” says Union Square Ventures partner Brad Burnham, who gave DuckDuckGo its first single series. financing 2011n. When it started, Google controlled 90% of the market and spent billions of dollars, collecting data from billions of users to make its product even better. DuckDuckGo, however, “offered something that Google couldn’t offer,” Burnham said, “They offered not to follow you. And Google’s entire business model is obviously based on its ability to do so, so Google couldn’t he replied “Okay, we won’t follow you either.”
Neither DuckDuckGo nor anyone else came close to preventing Google from dominating the searches. Today, Google’s market share is around 90 percent. But the cake is huge — the advertisers spent $ 60 billion in U.S. search ads last year alone, according to eMarketer, is even quite a bit of money in a tiny slice. It’s been DuckDuckGo profitable Since 2014.
Like Google Search, DuckDuckGo makes money by selling ads on people’s search results. The difference is that the ads you see when you search on Google are targeted based on your past searches, and what Google generally knows about your behavior is that DuckDuckGo is a mere “context,” which is based solely on the search term. DuckDuckGo knows nothing about you. It does not assign you an identifier or track search history to personalize your results.
This unseen view, however, protects you while you’re at DuckDuckGo. “You’re anonymous in the search engine, but once clicked, you’ll now go to other websites that are less anonymous,” says Weinberg. “How do we protect you there?”
The first answer to this question from DuckDuckGo was released in 2018, when it launched a desktop browser extension and a mobile browser that blocks third-party followers by default where a user is on the Internet. It was a good time: 2018 was a year to boost privacy awareness. Facebook Cambridge Analytica that spring a scandal broke out. The GDPR It came into force in Europe, with little relaxation on how the US regulates data collection. That summer, the Associated Press revealed Although many Google services have decided not to explicitly store your location data. Data collection and privacy were strong in the national conversation. Since, congress inquiries, antitrust litigation, Netflix documentaries, and a the quarrel grows They have kept it between Apple and Facebook.
“One of the funniest things about DuckDuckGo is that the best marketing we’ve ever done has been the gaffes that Google and Facebook have made over the years,” Burnham says. “Cambridge Analytica, for example, was a huge driver of adoption for DuckDuckGo. There is a growing awareness of how this business model works and what it means, not only in terms of the loss of privacy and agency over our data, but also in terms of what it means to live and succeed in an open market. ”
Consciousness is one thing, action is another. DuckDuckGo was in a position to take advantage of the rise of the scandal because it has a reputation for building products that work. In 2019, for example he added extension and browser function, which allows users to target encrypted versions of websites whenever possible, avoiding potential hackers or ISPs, say, while typing the password from your shoulder into a web page. While other encryption tools work by manually creating lists of tens of thousands of websites that need upgrading, DuckDuckGo crawled the Internet to automatically populate the list of more than 12. million sites. Electronic Frontier Foundation recently he announced DuckDuckGo’s data set would be included for its HTTPS Everywhere extension. Apple also uses DuckDuckGo Radar Tracker data set — a constantly updated and publicly available list of trackers mounted using open source code — to prevent Safari tracking.
Weinberg is particularly proud of the prevention of DuckDuckGo followers. Surveillance is so integrated into the web infrastructure that many sites will stop working if you block all cookies. Take Google Analytics, which is found on most websites. “If you block Google Analytics directly, you’ll break down sites,” Weinberg says. As a result, the main browsers that prevent tracking, Safari and Firefox, allow followers to upload and then try to limit the data they can collect.
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