What Is DuckDuckGo?

Date First Published: 29th December 2022

Topic: Web Design & Development

Subtopic: Web Organisations

Article Type: Computer Terms & Definitions

Difficulty: Medium

Difficulty Level: 5/10

CONTENTS

How Does DuckDuckGo Make Money?
Advantages and Disadvantages Of DuckDuckGo

Learn more about what DuckDuckGo is in this article.

DuckDuckGo is a search engine that puts emphasis on protecting people's privacy and anonymity. Unlike Google, Bing, and Yahoo, it does not keep track of people's past search data or use their personal preferences or location to personalise the search results and target ads. DuckDuckGo shows quick results to queries using Bing and its own crawler. The company is based in Paoli, Pennsylvania, in Greater Philadelphia and as of November 2022, it had 200 employees. The name refers to the children's game duck, duck, goose.

How Does DuckDuckGo Make Money?

DuckDuckGo makes money by displaying ads based on the keywords people search for and not them. For example, if someone searched 'washing up liquid', the ads on the DuckDuckGo page will be relevant to that. Unlike Google, where ads may start appearing on websites using Google's ad network if someone searches for a keyword, DuckDuckGo won't remember that they looked that up once they navigate to a new page. They also have a non-tracking affiliate partnership with eBay that is not based on any profiling. If someone visits eBay through DuckDuckGo and makes a purchase, they will receive a small commission from the sale.

Advantages and Disadvantages Of DuckDuckGo

The advantages of DuckDuckGo are:

Improved privacy. DuckDuckGo does not track what people have searched before or their location and displays personalised ads or search results based on that.
It offers additional features, including readily available weather data, extra features for developers, loan calculators, and more.
It is simple and easy to use.

The disadvantages of DuckDuckGo are:

It doesn't offer as many services as Google and Bing, such as webmaster tools.
There are no autosuggestions to complete searches quicker.
It is not as convenient as other search engines. Since it doesn't have the same market share as Google, it is not possible to sync lots of accounts and services with it.