W Post
July 1, 2013
DuckDuckGo sees user base jump, fueled by tracking concerns
By _Hayley Tsukayama_
(http://www.washingtonpost.com/hayley-tsukayama/2011/03/25/AFwMAnXB_page.html)
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Privacy worries about tracking across the Web have fueled a tremendous
jump in the number of users at DuckDuckGo, a smaller search engine that
promises never to track its users.
The flood started almost the moment stories broke detailing the U.S.
National Security Agency’s PRISM surveillance program, said Gabriel Weinberg,
the
creator and chief executive of the search engine.
“We’re up about 90 percent from a few weeks ago,” Weinberg said in an
interview with The Washington Post. The site is now regularly logging at least
3 million searches a day, according to its _traffic page_
(https://duckduckgo.com/traffic.html) . While that doesn’t come remotely close
to
challenging Google, Weinberg said that he thinks DuckDuckGo’s growth in recent
weeks
shows that there is a population of Internet users looking for alternatives
to safeguard their privacy.
Weinberg, who was _profiled by The Post last year_
(http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/ducking-google-in-search-engines/2012/11/09/6cf3af10-2842-11e
2-bab2-eda299503684_story.html) , said he did not add tracking in the
DuckDuckGo design to keep his site clean and fast. The search engine also
gives
users the option to turn off ads. But privacy, more than search speed,
quickly became one of DuckDuckGo’s major selling points.
In recent weeks, this small search engine has popped up on lists of Web
privacy options — including from the _Electronic Frontier Foundation _
(http://prism-break.org/) — and has drawn attention from major media outlets
that
Weinberg said has allowed him to reach all kinds of groups that he never
thought would find the search engine on their own.
“We were on the business shows — I went on CNBC and Bloomberg twice — and
we were on “Fox and Friends,” in front of that Fox News crowd,” he said. “
I don’t think we had ever had any exposure to that before.”
Weinberg isn’t able to collect much hard data on who his new users are —
since that is, more or less, the reason that they’re coming to DuckDuckGo.
But he said he’s heard a lot of user feedback from Twitter and in person
that indicates to him that DuckDuckGo’s growth spurt has been fueled by the
media appearances and word of mouth.
The site has several mechanisms to try to ensure _user privacy_
(https://duckduckgo.com/privacy) : It keeps cookies only if a user wants to
change
settings on the site, such as turning off ads; it saves searches but does not
link them to a user’s IP address or with any unique numbers, and the search
engine says it has no way of figuring out what queries came from where.
For advertising, the site may put its own code into ads to get credit for the
clicks, but it doesn’t track who clicks what, only the total number of
clicks a particular ad gets.
The search engine has seen spikes before, which _Weinberg details in a
chart on his site_ (https://duckduckgo.com/traffic.html) , including when
Google changed its privacy policy in March 2012. With most of the site’s
bumps,
he said, usage tends to ramp up and then level out as some of the new users
forget their outrage and slip back to what’s comfortable.
The search engine has steadily gained users at each of those plateaus, and
Weinberg said that he hopes visual and other improvements he’s made to the
site will help keep more users from turning back to more familiar search
engines.
“People are seeking privacy alternatives, but want things that have little
to no sacrifice,” he said. “And if they switch to something and don’t
like the results, they’ll go back.”
This time, he said, things may be a little different. This outrage over
privacy concerns, he said, has a sharper tone than any that have come before,
in part because the scope of the violations is on a much larger scale.
“It’s already been a bigger story [than Google’s privacy policy]. Everyone
on the planet is arguably affected by this,” he said. The longer the story
stays in the news, he said, the more people are going to look for
alternatives to the companies named as participants in the PRISM program.
Weinberg said that greater awareness about the Internet’s relationship with
users has also been a major force behind user growth, as more and more
people are beginning to understand how not only the government may track them
through company Web sites but also how the companies themselves keep tabs
on consumers.
“We’ve run education campaigns, and what we generally see is when people
land on that stuff, they haven’t known anything about is beforehand,” he
said. “Once they find about tracking, then they care.”
Weinberg said that advances in the way companies track users have brought
the issue to the forefront. Because these tools are now so sophisticated, he
said, users are noticing, for example, when a cool jacket they were
looking at on one site is advertised to them on another. That’s made people
wary
about what profiles ad firms may be building from their data, and clued
them in to just how much personal information they’re putting into companies’
hands.
“The tracking is in­cred­ibly more inlaid in the Internet, and that
is starting to change things,” he said. “There are many reasons besides
government requests that you may not want to be tracked.”
Weinberg is now offering the DuckDuckGo alternative for smartphones, with
mobile search engine apps for Android and iOS users. The he apps do have a
feed of content culled from sites such as Reddit and Digg, as well as more
traditional news sites, it mimics its desktop search engine and does not
require users to sign in or create a profile.
The apps pick up a bare minimum of information up from users, Weinberg
said. They are governed by the same privacy policy – both do require
permission
for the Web but don’t have location-based search.
“On the next Android update, I think it only requires one permission — to
use the Internet,” he said.
Weinberg said the next Android update will include support for another tool
popular with the privacy crowd —_ the TOR browser_
(https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&ved=0CCwQFjAA&url=http://ww
w.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/06/10/five-ways-to-stop-the-nsa-
from-spying-on-you/&ei=rYfRUZ2kOIPB0gHKkIDIDQ&usg=AFQjCNGFC1jYzqr7h10DuxQ-te
I4Hpdzrg&bvm=bv.48572450,d.dmQ) .
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