Duck Duck Go

Duck Duck Go is a search engine based in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania that uses information from crowd-sourced sites (like Wikipedia) with the aim of augmenting traditional results and improving relevance. The search engine philosophy emphasizes privacy and does not record user information.[1]

Duck Duck Go was founded by Gabriel Weinberg, a serial entrepreneur whose last venture (The Names Database) was acquired by United Online (NASDAQ:UNTD) in 2006 for $10M.[2]  Weinberg has a B.S. in Physics and an M.S. in Technology and Policy from MIT.[3]  The project was initially self-funded by Weinberg and is intended to be advertising supported.[4]  The search engine is written in Perl and runs on nginx and FreeBSD.[1]

Duck Duck Go is built primarily upon search APIs from major vendors (such as Yahoo! Search BOSS), because of this, TechCrunch characterized the service as a "hybrid" search engine.[5][6] At the same time, it produces its own content pages, and so also is similar to sites like Mahalo, Kosmix and SearchMe.[7]

Some reporters have called the name silly or inappropriate for a search engine.[8] When questioned about the name, Weinberg has explained, "[r]eally it just popped in my head one day and I just liked it. It is certainly influenced/derived from Duck Duck Goose, but other than that there is no relation, e.g. a metaphor."[9] The company's FAQ says "I just liked it. It is derived from Duck Duck Goose, but it's not a metaphor—really."[10]

Precise traffic statistics are not public, but Compete.com estimates 199,441 monthly visitors in May, 2010.[11] As of June 11, 2009, Alexa reported a 3 month growth rate of 134%.[12]

Duck Duck Go has been featured on Techcrunch as a part of Elevator Pitch Friday [13] and it was a finalist in the BOSS Mashable Challenge.[14]

In July 2010 Weinberg started a Duck Duck Go community website to allow the public to report problems, discuss means of spreading the search engine, request features and discuss open sourcing the code.[15]


Duck Duck Go's results are a mashup of many sources, including Yahoo! Search BOSS, Wikipedia, and its own Web crawler (DuckDuckBot).[1][16]  It uses data from crowd-sourced sites, especially Wikipedia, to populate "Zero-click Info" boxes, which are red boxes containing topic summaries and related topics above results.[17]  Duck Duck Go also offers the ability to show mostly shopping sites or mostly info (non-shopping) sites via search buttons on its homepage.[18]

Duck Duck Go positions itself as a search engine that puts privacy first and as such it does not store IP addresses, does not log user information, and only uses cookies when needed. Weinberg states "By default, DuckDuckGo does not collect or share personal information. That is our privacy policy in a nutshell."[19]

Weinberg has refined the quality of his search engine results by deleting search results for companies he believes are content mills, like Demand Media's eHow, which publishes 4000 articles per day produced by paid freelance writers, which Weinberg has indicated is "low-quality content designed specifically to rank highly in Google's search index". Duck Duck Go attempts to filter eHow results as well as pages with lots of advertising.[20]

In August 2010 Duck Duck Go introduced anonymous searching, including an exit enclave, for its search engine traffic using Tor. This allows anonymity by routing traffic through a series of encrypted relays. Weinberg stated: "I believe this fits right in line with our privacy policy. Using Tor and DDG, you can now be end to end anonymous with your searching. And if you use our encrypted homepage, you can be end to end encrypted as well."[21]