They describe the practise of targeting results based on past searches as placing a user in a ' bubble,' where everything is controlled based on what you want to see (e.g. DuckDuckGo promises to never track a user's clicks, or use previous searchers to aid current results. The growth can be seen on the chart below, found on DuckDuckGo's website:īut what sets DuckDuckGo apart from Bing or Google? According to Weinberg, it's simple: Privacy. Now, in April 2013, just three years later, the search engine is experiencing almost 50 million searches per month (an average of 1.6 million per day). In April 2010, DuckDuckGo was receiving around 1.18 million 'direct' user searches per month.

While DuckDuckGo is definitely not on the scale of Bing or Google, the small, mostly self-funded startup is growing at an impressive rate. But DuckDuckGo is the most significant thing to happen to the search world since Page and Brin founded Google back in 1998. Some of you may not have heard of DuckDuckGo, as it operates quietly with very little advertisement. At the time, Weinberg was in his 20s, married and had cash to spare and nothing to do with it, until he thought of DuckDuckGo. Back in 2006, Weinberg sold ' The Names Database' to for around $10 million. And, up until now, no-one has come close to toppling them. Google is, to some, 'the Internet' the place where you start your Internet experience. From humble beginnings, Google has grown to dominate over 70% of the search engine market, 60% of the smartphone operating system market and has made billions and billions of dollars in the process. Their names were Sergey Brin and Larry Page, and they had just founded Google. In 1998, two college friends decided to build a method of analysing every website on the Internet to find the most relevant information when a user put in a small amount of text.

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