Duckduckgo 100m Jan. August 2bcimpanuzdnet – In December 2017, DuckDuckGo revealed that it had raised an additional $100 million in secondary investment from international investors. The company listed a number of reasons for the growth, including its continued popularity for people who seek private and anonymous internet usage.
Founded in 2008 by Gabriel Weinberg, DuckDuckGo is a search engine that doesn’t track its users. While it has been around since the late 2000s, it has grown substantially over the past few years with increased awareness of privacy concerns online. DuckDuckGo isn’t a threat to Google in terms of its search engine, but it is becoming an alternative for people looking for private and private searches.
While DuckDuckGo still doesn’t have the same resources as Google or other bigger players in the search game, it has managed to hit significant milestones over the past few years. In an interview with CNBC, DuckDuckGo CEO Gabriel Weinberg noted that more people are turning to the search engine due to privacy concerns. He also noted that adults over 35 are also using it more than before for research because of increasing concerns about online privacy.
“We were born in the early years of the internet, with a similar value to our customers: privacy,” Weinberg said. “That’s why we don’t store or share any personal data from our users with third parties and we’re continuing to expand.”
The search engine is still relatively under the radar compared to bigger players like Google and Bing. But DuckDuckGo is becoming more of an alternative for those who believe that Google or another big name search engine tracks too much about their searches.
The startup doesn’t have the same resources as companies like Google or Facebook, so it has to be creative about how it builds its business. Weinberg said that the startup’s business model has always been data-centric, and its next step is to look into other items around analytics in addition to search.
“One of our future challenges could be much broader than what we’re currently doing,” Weinberg said. “Analytics could end up becoming a lot more interesting than search. We’re very interested in learning more about that, as we’ve noticed that people are pushing the limits of how much data they want to be shared, especially with Google and Facebook.”
The company has been ranked by Alexa as the 12th most popular search engine worldwide with more than 60 million unique monthly visitors. DuckDuckGo currently logs 8 million searches per day, and it says that those searches are increasing by 50 percent month over month.
According to Weinberg, the growth is likely coming from expanding awareness around privacy concerns. People are becoming increasingly aware of how much data they share online, and they want to make sure that the search engines and sites they use are private.
“There’s an increase in privacy awareness, even with something like the government’s online privacy bill [CISPA], it got a lot of attention,” Weinberg said. “People started to think about these things more.”
Weinberg also noted that millions of people are using DuckDuckGo on mobile as well as desktop thanks to its simple interface. The startup currently has more than 3 million mobile apps for iOS and Android, and it says that the growth is likely coming from its simple search functionality.
“Our growth is probably coming from our use on mobile devices,” Weinberg said. “We’ve built a simple, clean interface that mimics many of the common search interfaces out there.”
