Recent changes to Google’s privacy policies, as well as changes to how it organizes search results, have some people crying foul.
But for others, these changes, which include the injection of Google Plus information into Google Web searches (known as “search plus your world”), provide an opportunity to educate users about how companies may be using their data online, and what they can do to keep their data away from prying eyes and social signal-chasing advertisers.
Launched in 2008, DuckDuckGo is a search engine that has recently gained traction among technology pundits because of its dedication to user privacy as well as the accuracy of results; it doesn’t keep track of users at all and keeps no logs of their searches. In fact, the search engine, which received funding from Union Square Ventures last fall, said last week that it had broken all-time traffic records, with nearly 850,000 direct search queries conducted on Wednesday. The search engine averaged slightly less than 80,000 such queries per day as recently as one year ago.
And though that number may not represent much more than a drop in the bucket of all Web searches — recent comScore data shows that there was some 18.2 billion “core searches” in the U.S. last December — DuckDuckGo founder and chief executive Gabriel Weinberg said he believes that as more people become familiar with these complicated privacy issues, the more they’ll choose his site for their searching needs.
“I was kicking around a couple of ideas that were all related to search in one way or another,” Weinberg told The Daily. “I saw an opening for a search engine that did things a little differently but that might still be useful, but I didn’t have any expectations for its success.”
Based near Philadelphia, Weinberg graduated from MIT and doubles as an angel investor (he sold a company to United Online in 2006 for $10 million). He designed DuckDuckGo to address some of the concerns that people have had with Google and other search engines over the years. “We try to focus on things that the big guys don’t do for a variety of reasons,” he said. “Usually those reasons aren’t technical, but rather business, legal, and cultural. It’s somewhat silly trying to compete with Google on a technical basis.”
The DuckDuckGo team — there are three full-time employees, but for the first few years of its existence Weinberg essentially ran it on his own from his basement — initially focused on things like aggressively eliminating spam from search results and creating a clean, simple interface, “kind of the way Google was when it first came out,” he said. From a design point of view, “it’s the Apple of search engines.”
There was no particular focus on privacy when the business was launched, but instead “came about as the site evolved,” he said. “Over time, we got questions about our privacy policy. That wasn’t something I had thought about as much, but as I started researching it, it dawned on me that the privacy mentality we’ve taken is the right approach for users. Fundamentally, it just seems very creepy to know so much about users based on their search queries, which are very personal.”
“Privacy,” he added, “is quite a mainstream issue if people are educated about it.”
The approach — Weinberg credits Reddit users with pushing him in the direction of greater privacy transparency — couldn’t be simpler, with the site’s privacy policy spanning just a few words: “DuckDuckGo does not collect or share personal information. That is our privacy policy in a nutshell.”
Compare that to Google, whose new privacy policy has drawn criticism both in the media and in Congress, with several lawmakers alleging that it doesn’t allow users to opt-out of being followed across the company’s various services, such as YouTube, Gmail and Google Maps. Google disputes those allegations, saying the change was mainly done to unify more than 60 privacy policies it had accrued over the years as a result of numerous acquisitions, and that users don’t have to be signed in to use all of its services. “We’re making things simpler and we’re trying to be upfront about it,” the company said on its blog.
Google also turned heads in recent weeks by heavily incorporating Google Plus information into Web search results, seemingly at the expense of more relevant information from places like Twitter and Facebook. In fact, a team of engineers from Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace released a tool, nicknamed the “Don’t Be Evil” bookmarklet, to revert search results to the way they were before the Google’s “search plus your world” initiative began earlier this month.
For Weinberg, delivering results like that would be antithetical to its mission.
“I don’t see how those kinds of search results are super compelling for users,” he said. “Google has been saying for a few years that it wanted to improve search results with personalizing, but I haven’t found them to be that much better.” (Personalized search is opt-out in Google.)
“Besides, he added, “we would never do something like that.”
But for others, these changes, which include the injection of Google Plus information into Google Web searches (known as “search plus your world”), provide an opportunity to educate users about how companies may be using their data online, and what they can do to keep their data away from prying eyes and social signal-chasing advertisers.
Launched in 2008, DuckDuckGo is a search engine that has recently gained traction among technology pundits because of its dedication to user privacy as well as the accuracy of results; it doesn’t keep track of users at all and keeps no logs of their searches. In fact, the search engine, which received funding from Union Square Ventures last fall, said last week that it had broken all-time traffic records, with nearly 850,000 direct search queries conducted on Wednesday. The search engine averaged slightly less than 80,000 such queries per day as recently as one year ago.
And though that number may not represent much more than a drop in the bucket of all Web searches — recent comScore data shows that there was some 18.2 billion “core searches” in the U.S. last December — DuckDuckGo founder and chief executive Gabriel Weinberg said he believes that as more people become familiar with these complicated privacy issues, the more they’ll choose his site for their searching needs.
“I was kicking around a couple of ideas that were all related to search in one way or another,” Weinberg told The Daily. “I saw an opening for a search engine that did things a little differently but that might still be useful, but I didn’t have any expectations for its success.”
Based near Philadelphia, Weinberg graduated from MIT and doubles as an angel investor (he sold a company to United Online in 2006 for $10 million). He designed DuckDuckGo to address some of the concerns that people have had with Google and other search engines over the years. “We try to focus on things that the big guys don’t do for a variety of reasons,” he said. “Usually those reasons aren’t technical, but rather business, legal, and cultural. It’s somewhat silly trying to compete with Google on a technical basis.”
The DuckDuckGo team — there are three full-time employees, but for the first few years of its existence Weinberg essentially ran it on his own from his basement — initially focused on things like aggressively eliminating spam from search results and creating a clean, simple interface, “kind of the way Google was when it first came out,” he said. From a design point of view, “it’s the Apple of search engines.”
There was no particular focus on privacy when the business was launched, but instead “came about as the site evolved,” he said. “Over time, we got questions about our privacy policy. That wasn’t something I had thought about as much, but as I started researching it, it dawned on me that the privacy mentality we’ve taken is the right approach for users. Fundamentally, it just seems very creepy to know so much about users based on their search queries, which are very personal.”
“Privacy,” he added, “is quite a mainstream issue if people are educated about it.”
The approach — Weinberg credits Reddit users with pushing him in the direction of greater privacy transparency — couldn’t be simpler, with the site’s privacy policy spanning just a few words: “DuckDuckGo does not collect or share personal information. That is our privacy policy in a nutshell.”
Compare that to Google, whose new privacy policy has drawn criticism both in the media and in Congress, with several lawmakers alleging that it doesn’t allow users to opt-out of being followed across the company’s various services, such as YouTube, Gmail and Google Maps. Google disputes those allegations, saying the change was mainly done to unify more than 60 privacy policies it had accrued over the years as a result of numerous acquisitions, and that users don’t have to be signed in to use all of its services. “We’re making things simpler and we’re trying to be upfront about it,” the company said on its blog.
Google also turned heads in recent weeks by heavily incorporating Google Plus information into Web search results, seemingly at the expense of more relevant information from places like Twitter and Facebook. In fact, a team of engineers from Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace released a tool, nicknamed the “Don’t Be Evil” bookmarklet, to revert search results to the way they were before the Google’s “search plus your world” initiative began earlier this month.
For Weinberg, delivering results like that would be antithetical to its mission.
“I don’t see how those kinds of search results are super compelling for users,” he said. “Google has been saying for a few years that it wanted to improve search results with personalizing, but I haven’t found them to be that much better.” (Personalized search is opt-out in Google.)
“Besides, he added, “we would never do something like that.”
