What is DuckDuckGo?
DuckDuckGo is a search engine designed to completely secure all our your search history and data. Over the past two years you may have noticed Firefox, Chrome and Safari moving over to a secure search. When you search using Google, you will notice the URL starting with “https://” noting that none of your data will be stored by the search engine. What Google still does is capture your search history for the next time you use Google to help sell their re-makerting advertising.
What is Re-Marketing?
Have you every searched for something you wanted to purchase and then noticed that every ad you saw on different websites were all for the same or similar products to the one you wanted to buy? That is the idea behind re-marketing. Google stores your history and then they can display ads to you that they think you may be interested in buying. Where DuckDuckGo separates itself from other search engines, is that they do not store that data nor sell it to others to use for re-marketing purposes.
Why Do People Use DuckDuckGo?
It may scare you to think that search engines save your history and then try to sell you things they think you may want to buy. Some people feel that your search engine is getting to up close and personal. To keep your distance from search engines and online marketers, DuckDuckGo provides a history free environment.
DuckDuckGo uses its own search algorithm and relies heavily on external factors such as: Yelp, Wikipedia, and WolframAlpha. Their search engine also relies heavily on link ( both followed and no followed) as Wikipedia is a strong factor for them. Using these factors they aim to provide cleaner, more efficient search results and experience.
Why Are We Talking About DuckDuckGo Now?
DuckDuckGo was founded in 2008 and is not new to the internet by any stretch. Recently, their search value has increased greatly with over a billion search queries in 2013.
What is more exciting for DuckDuckGo is that in a few days Apple will roll out is new operating system for mobile devices (iOS 8) which offer users the ability to select DuckDuckGo as their default search engine. Mobile search volume is currently on the rise. In the United States, mobile search queries represent 30% of the total search volume. In India, mobile searches represent close to 60% of the market. Apple products currently represent 41.4% of the US cellphone market and roughly 14% of the Global market. From these numbers its not hard to see that DuckDuckGo could exponentially expand their share in the search engine market.
So is it possible for DuckDuckGo to surpass Bing in the coming year? My gut feeling is no. Bing, Yahoo and Google are all household names and also much easier for people to spell. This will contribute to their stay at the top of the leader board for search queries. While DuckDuckGo may gain ground in mobile device search numbers, they still have ground to make up in the iPad, tablet, laptop and desktops markets. Education is also a factor when considering DuckDuckGo. The highly educated who understand re-marketing and secure search may want to switch search engines, however the majority of online users still need more education in these matters. If you fail to understand “secure search” and re-marketing, there is not much draw to DuckDuckGo for the common user.
By Matthew Wilkos