DuckDuckGo Beats Bing to Become #2 Mobile Search Engine in US, Canada, Australia (spreadprivacy.com) 91
There are some big announcements on DuckDuckGo's blog at SpreadPrivacy.com:
- "Our apps have been downloaded more than 50 million times over the last 12 months, more than all prior years combined...
- "Spurred by the increase in DuckDuckGo app usage, over the last 12 months our monthly search traffic increased 55% and we grew to become the #2 search engine on mobile in many countries including in the U.S., Canada, Australia, and the Netherlands. (StatCounter/Wikipedia)."
- "We don't track our users so we can't say for sure how many we have, but based on market share estimates, download numbers, and national surveys, we believe there are between 70-100 million DuckDuckGo users."
- "We're excited to start rolling out additional privacy features to our all-in-one privacy bundle. In a few weeks, DuckDuckGo Email Protection will be available in beta which will give users more privacy without having to get a new inbox. Later this summer, app tracker blocking will be available in beta for Android devices, allowing users to block app trackers and providing more transparency on what's happening behind the scenes on their device. Before the end of the year, we also plan to release a brand-new desktop version of our existing mobile app which people can use as a primary browser."
They're now pulling in over $100 million a year in revenue, "giving us the financial resources to continue growing rapidly," and at the end of 2020 they also landed a "mainly secondary investment" of over $100 million from a long list of investors (which included Tim Berners-Lee as well as Freada Kapor Klein and Mitch Kapor).
One thing they're doing with their money is spreading the word about online privacy — by purchasing billboard, radio, and TV ads in 175 different markets across the U.S., with more marketing blitzes now planned soon for Europe and other countries around the world.
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What, trying to scam the search engines into giving you a higher ranking backfired on you? Good. Shows the system is working.
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I've been using them for years and not seen your observations.
Btw, on my Android phone I'm a very happy user of their Firefox based browser.
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Why can not only be on your phone? I do not see what your talking about.
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I use it on the iPhone and I've never had any such issues with it.
Re: That DuckDuckGo is so spammy (Score:2)
You have a malware problem.
Re:We don't track our users (Score:5, Interesting)
Their revenue stream is showing ads based on search terms rather than on tracking.
Some other companies have tried that too and found that revenue actually increases.
On the other hand they are based in the United States which doesn't have strong privacy laws, so they could be tracking users and there is nothing to stop them changing their terms of service later to sell your data. If they had an EU subsidiary covered by GDPR it would be easier to trust them.
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> Their revenue stream is showing ads based on search terms rather than on tracking.
Targeted ads are worth more than random ads, since you're more likely to buy (or at least click though on) ads that are closer aligned with your interests. In order to do that most effectively, though, they need to collect data about you and determine your interests.
So maybe it's not DDG that's tracking you, but they could still be letting third parties do that. Even if they're protecting you *now* it's only a matter of t
Re:We don't track our users (Score:5, Insightful)
> Their revenue stream is showing ads based on search terms rather than on tracking.
Targeted ads are worth more than random ads, since you're more likely to buy (or at least click though on) ads that are closer aligned with your interests. In order to do that most effectively, though, they need to collect data about you and determine your interests.
So maybe it's not DDG that's tracking you, but they could still be letting third parties do that. Even if they're protecting you *now* it's only a matter of time before capitalism does its thing. Remember when Google's motto was "Don't be evil?"
Yes, targeted ads are worth more than search term based ads. But you also need users to show the ads to. And the reason that DDG has users is exactly because they don't track users. Otherwise their ad revenue would be something close to zero instead of a 100 million USD per year. So capitalism is doing its thing. It is providing a service that people wants even though the revenue per search is less than that of Google.
Re:We don't track our users (Score:5, Informative)
Oh yeah... Because Google tracks users and their revenue is close to zero...
No, because not everyone values privacy over convenience. In fact most don't. But those who do use search engines like DDG.
The honest way: DDG sacrifices some per-user revenue by not tracking them, hoping this will be more than made up by the extra privacy-conscious users it attracts
- The crooked way: DDG is just as bad as Google but pretends they're not, deceiving privacy-conscious users into using DDG instead of Google.
In the end, it comes down to this: do you trust a for-profit (and a US for-profit at that) to turn an honest profit it that means foregoing some of the profit? Do you trust DDG to make money, but not at any cost?
Do you? I don't. At the very least, I err on the side of considering them unprincipled by default, because most corporations are.
DDG has a privacy policy that is: "DuckDuckGo does not collect or share personal information. That is our privacy policy in a nutshell."
https://duckduckgo.com/privacy [duckduckgo.com]
You may not believe that they are abiding by this privacy policy. Personally I haven't seen any indications in the last 10 years that they are breaking it. And they will also be breaking the law in many countries if they do when they state otherwise in their privacy policy - and the penalties are harsh. So until evidence shows otherwise I don't see any reasons to mistrust them.
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This could be a very viable model. DDG could position themselves to offer ad space without selling customer data. As long as they want to bear the cost of managing this, it could work.
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You may not believe that they are abiding by this privacy policy. Personally I haven't seen any indications in the last 10 years that they are breaking it. And they will also be breaking the law in many countries if they do when they state otherwise in their privacy policy - and the penalties are harsh. So until evidence shows otherwise I don't see any reasons to mistrust them.
I've not found any evidence either, and have computers set up to look for evidence.
It's quite simple - I've been at sites, and relaxed script blocking until the thing shows up, and next time I'm on Facebook, sure enough, a recommendation for me just so happens to have what I was looking at on that page.
Re:We don't track our users (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh yeah... Because Google tracks users and their revenue is close to zero...
The point is that if DDG was the same as Google (i.e., tracked users) then there would be no reason to use them as Google already owns that market. Not tracking is their USP.
Re:We don't track our users (Score:4)
The point is that if DDG was the same as Google (i.e., tracked users) then there would be no reason to use them
Exactly. I use DDG. If I am honest, their search is not as good as Google's. Most so, in many cases Google has more useful information in wiglets (e.g. unit and timezone conversion searches). Yet, I use DDG because I don't want Google to track me and I don't want Google to filter out unapproved search terms.
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Likewise. I still use Google, but only when DDG is being particularly unhelpful with their search results.
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Same here.
DDG by default, but at least 50% of the time I have to google search because the ddg results are crap.
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If evidence of DDG breaking that trust should leak, or if the suspicion of such breakage should become too great, DDG:s entire user base would disappear. That would be devastating for their value.
Not arguing for them being honest, but to me it makes sense business-wise to be.
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Indeed. They're results aren't as good as Google, so likely the *only* reason they have any users is because of their privacy promises.
And trust is one of those things that's hard to build, but easy to lose. One big reveal that they've been secretly tracking customers in violation of their promise, and their business would collapse almost overnight.
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I haven't found google searches to be all that "good" as to be noticeable. What I have found is that their searches are noticeably more targeted - it knows I searched for "eschatological widgets" in the past and it just cannot stop giving me related results even when I want to google "romcom playlists". The targeting becomes quite apparently and very often downtright creepy.
DuckDuckGo works. I have no need for the search results to be "better" as it does the job. I am not doing any qualitative analysis
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It's mostly for specific technical information that I find a dramatic difference, across a wide range of topics. That may just be that my Google filter-bubble "understands" the grade of technical information I'm likely to be looking for... but whatever works. I typically only use Google when I haven't found any relevant results in the first page or two on DDG, while Google usually delivers many relevant results on the first page.
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Yes, targeted ads are worth more than search term based ads. But you also need users to show the ads to. And the reason that DDG has users is exactly because they don't track users. Otherwise their ad revenue would be something close to zero instead of a 100 million USD per year....
Oh yeah... Because Google tracks users and their revenue is close to zero...
You're missing the point. Google already has captured the market for targetted ads to people who don't mind being tracked. If DuckDuckGo went after that market, their revenue would be zero because they are competing against the 800 pound gorilla, and they can't.
The fact that google tracks their users and makes tons of money doesn't mean that DuckDuckGo would make more money if they tracked their users-- the opposite.
Here's a useful fact about capitalism: you can't compete against the industry leader unless
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You can get both - use DuckDuckGo to use Google as the search engine, so that it's untracked and anonymous.
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Therefore, DDG has two ways of turning as much profit as possible:
- The honest way: DDG sacrifices some per-user revenue by not tracking them, hoping this will be more than made up by the extra privacy-conscious users it attracts
- The crooked way: DDG is just as bad as Google but pretends they're not, deceiving privacy-conscious users into using DDG instead of Google.
You missed a third way (and which I think is most likely).
- DDG follows option 1 above until achieving some critical mass, then changes TOS to "similar to Google." Some percentage of users flee, inertia keeps the rest in place and revenue increases as a result.
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I've lost the link now, there was an article in Dutch about a company that tried showing ads relevant to the page content and found that their revenue increased.
It makes even more sense for a search engine because the user is clearly interested in the thing they just searched for. The same is true to an extent for any page, the user came there because of interest in most cases.
The main problem for advertisers is that many of their products are not of interest, or need to be "discovered" before anyone will l
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I fully believe it.
Many of my targeted ads are for things I've already purchased.
Like I looked at a lot of bicycles 3 months ago, purchased on 2 months ago, and still I am seeing TONS of bike ads. Including the one I purchased.
All of those ads are useless to me, and yet they're about 1/3 of what I see.
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I also can't figure out how Newspapers and Magazines are failing so hard when they effectively always had an ad based revenue stream.
Re:We don't track our users (Score:4, Insightful)
Targeted ads are worth more than random ads
Sure, if they're actually targeted, or the ad buyer is an idiot.
Most targeted ads aren't targeted worth AF, and even the ones that are usually still fail to do anything useful.
I get ads for shit I have never expressed interest in even when I'm using platforms that target ads. And I also get ads for stuff I've just bought, or stuff like what I've just bought, when I obviously don't need to buy another one because I just bought one.
Part of the reason is that ad networks build bullshit profiles on you. Facebook auto-tags posts with keywords. If you interact with a posting in any way, even to laugh at it or be mad at it, facebook adds those tags to "your" "interests" even though you may be actively anti-interested in them. Then they sell advertisers keyword-based advertising, claiming it's interest-based. Well, it isn't.
If you're an ad buyer and you think you're paying for targeted ads, you're probably wrong. You're paying mostly for mis-targeted ads.
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Online advertisers are like people who go to a store owner and say "We will pay you $1000 a day to send our team of smelly homeless people to camp outside your store and harass patrons as they come in to do business." and the owner says "Wow, I don't understand how your business works but for that kind of money you've got a deal!"
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Targeted ads are worth more than random ads, since you're more likely to buy (or at least click though on) ads that are closer aligned with your interests. In order to do that most effectively, though, they need to collect data about you and determine your interests.
Yeah, no. That's what the companies selling targeted ads say, but it's not even slightly true.
What the "targeted" ads really do is pop up ads that are marginally related to what you've recently searched for or posted.
Did you buy goth bunny earrings for a friend who is into that sort of thing? Surely you want to see ads for jewelry for the next month!
Did you search for info on a disease mentioned in an article you were reading? Surely you want to see a few weeks worth of ads for various medications, most
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> > Their revenue stream is showing ads based on search terms rather than on tracking.
> Targeted ads are worth more than random ads
searched terms based != random
tracking != targeted
They're related, but not the same. Care to explain why search term-based is random instead of targeted? You cannot because search term based IS targeted.
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Right now Slashdot is showing a Google based Ad for a Geothermal Heat pump for my house.
I had already purchased and installed a Heat pump system for my house about 4 months ago. (I had even went to that advertisers site and found out my home wouldn't work with that system) I mean how many times should I install a new expensive HVAC systems for my house in a year?
The Targeted Ad system seems to be behind my action demand for a product, where I get ad's after I had bought it.
Random or psuto-random (based o
Re: We don't track our users (Score:2)
Google having a motto about being evil is one thing- it was vague and mocked even at the time.
Duckduckgo is explicitly about privacy. Yes, they could reverse course, especially if they want to start being political activists or something, but they are unlikely to do so just for whatever profits are offered by ad tracking, given that their entire userbase (or most of it) is based around privacy.
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Re:We don't track our users (Score:5, Informative)
The Freakonomics podcast did a couple of great episodes on this - Does Advertising Actually Work? :
https://freakonomics.com/podca... [freakonomics.com]
https://freakonomics.com/podca... [freakonomics.com]
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Decades ago I read the primary purpose of advertising was to get your company or products thought of as the standard for that product, like Kleenex, or Magic Markers, rather than direct sales.
Beers, soaps, they all do it. Observe this the next time there's a huge sales campaign for some brand you never saw before.
Re:We don't track our users (Score:4, Insightful)
Showing you ads for stuff you bought last week just isn't very useful.
And this ultimately is the problem of implementation. Google for all it's brilliance and access to information is actually incredibly frigging dumb, and it would be so easy to build up a system based on relational information.
E.g. I bought speakers. A week later I get nothing but adverts for speakers. That is stupid. That is dumb. Intelligent would be realising I have speakers and giving me adverts for room treatment, USB sound cards, streamers, you know related products.
Same with Cameras. I buy a Nikon camera and get adverts of Canon cameras. Fully retarded (in the intellectual sense). You're so busy tracking me that maybe you should consider advertising to me a camera lens, or cleaning kit, or a tripod.
This is actually shown to work and one of the companies that does this well to great effect is Amazon with their "Customers who bought this also bought..." bar at the bottom, or the combined listings, e.g. You bought an Aukey mobile charger, have you thought about a USB-C cable to go with it?
Now you could put that down to not knowing exactly what product was purchased, and I hope that's right but I suspect it isn't. Google apply the same ... "finesse" when they know the *exact* terms you use. E.g. I searched "beef stroganoff recipe". I clicked through 2 sites. Google knows I looked at them. I book marked one of them and then reopened them in my browser later that evening. The day after in my Google News feed I get ... a beef stroganoff recipe. Like WTF they have enough information about me to know I had that for dinner last night, why the hell would I be interested in it again. I still have leftovers!.
A more intelligent response would be how Youtube handles suggestions: "Because you searched beef stroganoff, here's a recipe for Pelmeni!" or Shashlik, or something related but not the exact same thing I already searched!
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I need to agree, Ad's for actually selling products, work better if based on your search results, and not by complex analytics. Because for the latter by the time the analytics correlates that you may be interested in a product, you had already bought it.
I may get a new laptop ever 8-10 years. So when I go is figure out what I should be getting, I may do a few days research to see what I would want to get, because after I have purchased a new laptop, I am kinda less interested in what the newer models are
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Their revenue stream is showing ads based on search terms rather than on tracking.
Some other companies have tried that too and found that revenue actually increases.
On the other hand they are based in the United States which doesn't have strong privacy laws, so they could be tracking users and there is nothing to stop them changing their terms of service later to sell your data. If they had an EU subsidiary covered by GDPR it would be easier to trust them.
Trust or don't trust. You can go a long way toward knowing what a website or search engine is doing by seeing what it is doing with your computer. I have my computers battened down pretty tight, and any time the detect something suspicious - like any script, I'm warned. Pain in the ass, but you get tired of the bullshit.
I'll know immediately if DDG starts collecting my data. And they know trying to sneak it on to people's computers will invoke a lot of howling.
Places like DDG actually form something surp
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Their revenue stream is adverts. Well, ask yourself: Did adverts exist before tracking users?
Let me help you out, the answer is yes. Having a revenue stream based on users does not depend on tracking them. Sure they won't be able to compete with Google Adsense, but is that actually the goal?
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Just checked it, DDG still tracks your clicks using a JS event. uBlock blocks it. Same as Bing.
Google uses the "ping" feature to do its tracking, and wraps links only if it can't use it. I don't know why it doesn't use the less intrusive JS event, anti-blocking maybe.
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"We don't track our users so we can't say for sure how many we have"
Translation: we track the shit out of our users, but we say we don't because our business model is pretending we don't track our users. Bonus: we have a good excuse not to reveal how many users we have.
How do you I know that?
Well, ask yourself: what's their revenue stream? They don't charge you anymore than Google does to perform searches for you, do they?
They are downstream developers? From a time when there was no revenue stream without being a faceless downstream developer? Before the argument of ; "....I know you merged it but I want to do it now, for revenue reasons....". I'm looking at you layer 7 folk right now....
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"We don't track our users so we can't say for sure how many we have"
Translation: we track the shit out of our users, but we say we don't because our business model is pretending we don't track our users. Bonus: we have a good excuse not to reveal how many users we have.
How do you I know that?
Well, ask yourself: what's their revenue stream? They don't charge you anymore than Google does to perform searches for you, do they?
The revenue stream comes from serving non tracking ads.
Quite simple.
Depeding on the search term, there's enough money to be made from that alone.
Also: Their search engine is not a refined as Google in guessing what you want, but some users may prefer a neutral search result.
Some other people may not want every letter they type when composing a search term sent too google.
Being able to advertise to these people at all is worth something.
Personally, I've been happy with DDG as my first search choice for years
Great news, but ... (Score:4, Insightful)
While this is awesome news it also means that DuckDuckGo has now been noticed by Microsoft and Google. Expect retaliatory and defensive measures to be taken by both Microsoft and Google in the near future.
.
Microsoft will start trying to sabotage DuckDuckGo. Every Windows update, whether it updates Edge of not, will reset the users search engine choice to Bing. Possibly the the network stack will have problems resolving DuckDuckGo's domain's, etc.
And Google will start to put pressure on the developers of any browser that uses DuckDuckGo as it's default search engine. This pressure will include but not be limited too offering the suits who run the operation lot of money to use Google again, or anything else just to hurt DuckDuckGo's market share.
First they laugh at you.
Then they fight you. (we are now here)
Then you win.
Re:Great news, but ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Or worse, Microsoft might buy it.
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"This flea is uppity. Buy them, throw three billion dollars at them. Get it from the receptionist's petty cash box."
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From what I have read, DuckDuckGo acts as an intermediary. They strip identifying information and pass request on to other search engines, that specifically includes Google and (I think) Bing. There is a bigger potential threat on the horizon, Brave is starting their own search engine and they will apparently be a "primary" rather than an intermediary.
I have been using DuckDuckGo as my browser for several years now, occasionally (1 or 2 times a year) cross-checking the results with Google's if I'm dissati
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DuckDuckGo actually has a mix. They do have their own bots building up their own indexes, but they also pull results from other search engines.
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You can always switch to startpage
Note that Startpage has been bought by advertising company System1. Whether Startpage can still be trusted is unclear [ghacks.net].
They say so (of course), but then I wonder why would an ad company want to own a search engine whose business model appears to be diametrically opposed to their own.
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That would be awesome (Score:1)
if the search engine was even slightly usable.
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I just went to duckduckgo.com. I was presented with a search bar. I typed in a search term hit search and was presented with results to my search.
Are you using search in some fundamentally different way the rest of us have not heard of? Are you trailing the latest Google Implant which just beams answers directly to your neurons or something?
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I just went to duckduckgo.com. I was presented with a search bar. I typed in a search term hit search and was presented with results to my search.
Are you using search in some fundamentally different way the rest of us have not heard of? Are you trailing the latest Google Implant which just beams answers directly to your neurons or something?
I agree that DDG is an excellent search engine. And I am using DDG for all my searches on tablet and PC/laptop and a majority of my searches on mobile. The reason that I don't use DDG for 100% of my searches on mobile is that I sometimes like to use speech input to search on mobile. DDG unfortunately cannot do that at the moment. And maybe that is a limitation of their business model since they cannot tailor the speech recognition individually. Or maybe it is just a resource question. I don't know, but it w
I though they were friends (Score:4, Funny)
as shown by thy photo https://qstar.ai/content/image... [qstar.ai]
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That one is even more appropriate
https://64.media.tumblr.com/fd... [tumblr.com]
2nd place? (Score:1)
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What's funnier is that they aren't actually in second place. Most of their search results are purchased from Bing to begin with.
Yawn, search//browser/os wars (Score:2, Insightful)
Difficult name (Score:2)
DuckDuckGo will never dominate the search engine business because its name is too difficult to pronounce and spell. Just recall what happened with the Yggdrasil so-called "plug and play" Lunux.
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How about RunSpotRun?
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DuckDuckGo web spider? (Score:3)
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Do you mean like this [duckduckgo.com]?
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extension works fine.. mobile browser meh (Score:2)
DuckDuckGo's mobile browser leaves something to be desired. Bookmarked links and links in the mobile phone's word history sometimes don't work. The browser UI is not that great, compared to Firefox on mobile.
I would not spend too much on TV ads and such... (Score:1)
If I had to decide on the markeding budget of DDG, I'd avoid mainstream TV ads and such like the plague.
So far, raising the user base by word of mouth has worked very well and running mainstream ads my actually work against that.
They could spend the money more wisely if they have extra money to spare.
Like sponsoring privacy law cases or if they have money to burn, by giving out swag so that people could run around in DDG t-shirts to advertise for them for free.
Confidence builder (Score:2)
Honestly, that they don't appear to have some statistics is a serious confidence builder.
Sorry, I ain't no fan of Google, but . . . (Score:2)
. . . DuckDuckGo sucks.
Most things I search on return a dozen or fewer hits on DDH, compared with 100s on Google, and yes, even the 100th is still relevant.
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. . . DuckDuckGo sucks.
Most things I search on return a dozen or fewer hits on DDH, compared with 100s on Google, and yes, even the 100th is still relevant.
I was thinking about this not too long ago, actually.
Google has a multi-decade head start, and probably exabytes of information they've managed to find through webcrawling over the years, and they've probably figured out a few extra tweaks to their searching sauce, even without all the pervasive user tracking. While I do try to make DDG my first place to search, I'll agree that half the time, I'm stuck going to Google.
At the same time, what are most of my searches? Error messages and other computer-specific
It's popular because... (Score:1, Troll)
It's just bing though (Score:3)
DDG needs to improve its search results though. (Score:2)
Google still has better search results. :(
Tank Man is first hit on Duck Duck Go (Score:2)
Bing has totally lost all of my trust.
Glad to see people are wising up fast. We need them to.
What revenue? (Score:2)
They're now pulling in over $100 million a year in revenue
How? It's free and it blocks tracking, which is what advertising is all about.