Wary of tracking, users flock to DuckDuckGo
First news of the government's Web tracking program PRISM broke late last Thursday, and by Friday, traffic at the indie search engine DuckDuckGo was on the upswing. The tagline on its homepage: "Search anonymously." "You could notice the difference almost immediately," Gabriel Weinberg, DuckDuckGo's founder told NBC News Friday.
The site set new traffic records this week, with roughtly 2.5 million searches conducted on Thursday alonew.
"Our users know that we don't track and were telling their friends and family," Weinberg explained. On its privacy page, the search engine promises: "When you search at DuckDuckGo, we don't know who you are and there is no way to tie your searches together."
Popular search engines like Google and Bing track user behavior and share that anonymized data with advertisers. But researchers say that piecing together bits of data to build a profile of an individual is getting easier.
Weinberg launched DuckDuckGo in 2008, and in 2009 made the decision not to store IP addresses — which are used to identify a computer users geographical location when connected to the Internet — or to track user information. "I didn't want to be involved in handing data to the government," Weinberg said.
Weinberg finds when Internet privacy issues make headlines, that's when Google or Bing users tend to jump ship. The last time DuckDuckGo saw a significant spike in traffic was January-March 2012, shortly after Google spooked users by announcing they would share information across its services. (That also coincided with a DuckDuckGo redesign.)
While DuckDuckGo has attracted users concerned about privacy, when Weinberg began DuckDuckGo in 2007 he only wanted to deliver a better search experience. "Oftentimes you want answers, not links," he said. When you search on DuckDuckGo, you get a definition of the thing you were looking for, followed by links that reference it. He'd wanted a clutter-free product: "More instant answers, less spam and content farms." Thats something most of us agree on, and we salute you DuckDuckGo for your protection of user privacy!