Many have tried to challenge Google's say-so of the search market over the past few years, from minor startups to big-name players with deep pockets. Only peradventure with the exception of Microsoft, which has poured billions into its search efforts, all have failed to gain any pregnant traction.

A relative newcomer to the search market place, DuckDuckGo isn't shying away from the awe-inspiring task, however. In fact, with a elementary, straightforward interface and make clean results they've come upwardly with one of the nearly appealing Google alternatives to date. Fifty-fifty if they are nonetheless far from changing the status quo, their no nonsense approach to privacy and instant answers are worth taking note of.

Nosotros had a take chances to talk with the site's creator Gabriel Weinberg a couple of weeks ago. Here'south what he had to say about his four-year-old search engine startup and his competitors.

TechSpot: Tell us a piddling bit about your professional background and how the idea of a building search engine (of all things) started.

Gabriel: I got into cyberspace startups correct out of school from MIT in 2000. I started a series of companies that went sideways and and then hitting upon 1 that was successful, which was sold in 2006 (Ed. annotation: Gabriel sold NamesDatabase.com to Classmates.com for $10 meg). I was in Boston at the time. I moved down to Philadelphia and started a number of projects again, simply had a lot more elbowroom into what I could practise, so I actually started messing around with things I was interested in. I didn't fix out to do a search engine, but experimented a chip with some projects that I thought would exist useful in search, things like more than aggressively identifying spam and removing that from search results, then using structured content like Wikipedia to ameliorate results.

Virtually a year into that I figured "hey, I could plow this into a search engine." I decided to package information technology upward into something I could launch and was just surprised at the response of people, and so I decided to really focus on information technology.

TS: So, initially this was a one-man project?

GW: Yeah. I cocky-funded it and worked on it substantially by myself for the first three years.

TS: And how big is the team right now?

GW: We are five full-time employees and then probably virtually 10 role-time people, and so almost 10 other contributors… So, it depends how you want to count it, but you could count us similar ten to 15.

TS: What exercise you call up DuckDuckGo'southward large intermission was?

GW: We really started growing since the beginning and if you wait dorsum, we've really had a like rate of growth of about 500% a year over the by several years, so I've been encouraged along the mode. We really focused on things we thought the bigger search engines weren't doing very well for various reasons.

That includes the removal of spam and structured content stuff I mentioned earlier, too as real privacy and a cleaner search experience -- getting rid of all the clutter and other stuff. Incrementally nosotros improved these 4 areas and at the end of 2022 information technology just seemed like they all kind of came together in a way that people started sticking more. So, I don't think it was i thing, information technology was just kind of incrementally improving the product to be in such a good place where people would want to use it as their primary search engine.

TS: Looking at the traffic statistics on your site I noticed there was a huge surge in traffic in January this year, right around around Data Privacy Day. What happened that day?

GW: Nosotros had fabricated these two microsites, DontTrack.us and DontBubble.us, which were actually upward a few months prior to that. We only wanted to spread them around considering they are educational regarding search privacy. Someone posted it on Reddit around that mean solar day and it made it to the front folio. It stayed there for a while then it probably brought in nearly 250,000 people to that page and spiked our traffic.

TS: What kind of traffic are you seeing right now?

GW: We've been bouncing around 40-45 million searches the terminal few months. You tin can detect that information in our traffic page, which is publicly available for anyone to run into.

TS: Tell us a little flake almost the technology backside DuckDuckGo.

GW: We are a hybrid engine then we have our own crawler only we also use a bunch of APIs from other sites, both for link results and what we like to focus on which is instant answers.

We utilise about 100 unlike sources including probably five different indexes on our own site -- indexes of different types for dissimilar things. When y'all type in a query what we really endeavor to practice is effigy out what category information technology is (proper name query, engineering science product, etc.) and road information technology to that best source and return an instant reply from that all-time source. The thesis is that when y'all type in a query, most of the time you'd be better served if you lot had gotten an answer or some piece of information from a vertical site, say like TechSpot for certain things. But people often don't know what those sites are, so information technology's our job to figure out that site and format information technology at the top.

TS: And among these sources you use, practise yous utilize Google at all?

GW: Not currently.

TS: Why?

GW: Mainly considering of privacy. They brand it very difficult to employ their data through our privacy policy, whereas with other providers we can road everything through us so we're non sharing any personal information when we call these APIs. Google is way more restrictive nearly how to call their APIs, and also they're branded, they don't usually similar third parties to change things around.

By default, if you utilise DuckDuckGo nosotros're not storing or sharing your personal information when yous behave a search. That's the kind of easy message that we try to stick to.

TS: Privacy-wise, what can users expect from DuckDuckGo?

GW: It's very simple. By default, if you apply DuckDuckGo we're not storing or sharing your personal information when you lot conduct a search. That's the kind of easy bulletin that nosotros try to stick to.

We try to go beyond that some cases. Nosotros attempt to not share a search when you click on organic links, we operate a Tor go out enclave, among other things. The lesser line is our goal is not to collect or share your personal information by default.

TS: Is there annihilation related to user searches that yous do log, even if it'south anonymous?

GW: Nosotros log the actual query in aggregate then nosotros tin can ameliorate spelling and things like that. Simply it's not tied to a given user in any fashion.

TS: The decision not to keep records that could be traced dorsum to users, was that something you lot picked up along the mode realizing users valued this, or was that the thought from the showtime?

GW: It wasn't the idea from the kickoff... actually it was non either of those choices. It was mainly because when I launched I didn't really know much well-nigh it. I immediately got a lot of questions nigh it and after looking into it I decided it was what I wanted to exercise for a couple of reasons. I, as a user myself I thought it was kind of creepy. And two, I didn't want to accept to hand over personal information to government and law enforcement via subpoenas, which is what all these tech companies are faced with. Even if they don't want to, they ofttimes take to via a courtroom order, so I thought we could accept it out of our hands by simply non collecting annihilation.

TS: Google says they need to log these large amounts of data in lodge to improve search results. What are your thoughts on this? Do yous experience DuckDuckGo is at a disadvantage for not storing user data when it comes to providing relevant search results?

Yous can still get a lot of useful information without tying it back to users.

GW: In that location are a couple of things to note at that place. The outset is we've taken a hybrid arroyo by using other people'southward APIs, similar Bing's for instance, and they already have a lot of useful data. So we tin can take some of that advantage without having to get users' information ourselves. Then, in that location is some truth in that. Having data helps.

However, y'all can yet become a lot of useful data without tying it back to users. You can see what people search for and you may have to estimate a little more, only y'all can still become a lot out of information technology.

Also, Google has reached a stage of diminishing returns with the corporeality of data they have. You can run into that in Bing'due south success. There's been a lot of studies that testify that they're nigh every bit relevant or more relevant in some cases than Google. And they accept a lot less information than Google. Then, what that says is you demand a sure corporeality of user data to get useful results out of information technology, but the difference in user information stored by Google compared to Bing -- which is pretty large -- is not seemingly mattering that much.

TS: Given information technology's market dominance, Google obviously receives a lot of heat from privacy advocates, and with reason: wifi snooping, safari cookies, etc. Just oftentimes (and this is just conjecture on my side, I might exist wrong) criticism comes from a vocal (more informed) minority and government regulators, while a majority of users may not know or care plenty well-nigh privacy to look for an alternative search engine. Practice y'all think this means DuckDuckGo will be relegated to a niche market?

GW: Our argument has been nosotros're producing better search results, actually. So, that's the real argument to use u.s.a.. Instant answers, less spam, less ataxia. Privacy has been a focus, just it'due south more of a motivator to go you to try usa out rather than the reason to stay with united states.

Only I do think privacy is a mainstream motivator. Once people are educated about privacy bug, they really do care, but there's a large education barrier. It'southward only most people have no idea of what's going on, and after they do and they've been surveyed near it they actually do care. I recollect the problem has been that in a lot of areas Google is in in that location's no compelling culling. We're trying to offering an alternative in search.