"I realised that there were millions of people who knew the right list of search terms and would make a better engine than Google." Taking a class in stained-glass making, he discovered that the teacher's handout with "useful web links" didn't tally with Google's results at all.
"My wife was doing her PhD, so I had some spare time," he says. The initial idea came after selling his previous startup, Opobox ("a sort of Friends Reunited"), for $10m (£6.7m) to in 2006. Weinberg, who lives with his wife and two sons, did not build his search engine with that intention. (Google provides an encrypted connection for logged-in users, but not automatically for non-logged in users.) If the NSA demanded data from DuckDuckGo, there would be none to hand over. It doesn't use cookies or store data about its users' IP addresses, doesn't offer user logins, and uses an encrypted connection by default. And 95% of people never change the default settings on anything.īut this 20-person business offers what none of the big search engines do: zero tracking. Using it is very definitely an active choice, whereas using Google is the default option on most browsers. (The name comes from the children's game DuckDuckGoose, a sort of tag involving seated players.) You won't find it offered as an alternative default search engine on any browser, on desktop or mobile. "If you asked 100 people, 96 would probably think it was a Chinese restaurant," as the SFGate site observed. Yet you've probably never heard of DuckDuckGo. "We started seeing an increase right when the story broke, before we were covered in the press." From serving 1.7m searches a day at the start of June, it hit 3m within a fortnight. "It happened with the release by the Guardian about Prism," says Weinberg, right, a 33-year-old living in Paoli, a suburb of Philadelphia on the US east coast.
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