DuckDuckGo
DuckDuckGo is an American software company that offers a number of products intended to help people protect their online privacy.[5] The flagship product is a search engine that has been praised by privacy advocates.[6][7] Subsequent products include extensions for all major web browsers[8] and a custom DuckDuckGo web browser.[9]
This article is about the search engine. For the children's game, see Duck, duck, goose.
Type of site
Multilingual
20 Paoli Pike,
Paoli, Pennsylvania, United States
Worldwide
Duck Duck Go, Inc.[1]
Gabriel Weinberg
Gabriel Weinberg
Steve Fishcher (CBO)
Yes
None
September 25, 2008[2]
Active
Headquartered in Paoli, Pennsylvania, DuckDuckGo is a privately held company with about 200 employees.[10] The company's name is a reference to the children's game duck, duck, goose.[11][12]
History[edit]
Early years[edit]
DuckDuckGo was founded by Gabriel Weinberg and launched on February 29, 2008, in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania.[2][13] Weinberg is an entrepreneur who previously launched Names Database, a now-defunct social network. Self-funded by Weinberg until October 2011, DuckDuckGo was then "backed by Union Square Ventures and a handful of angel investors."[13][14][15] Union Square partner Brad Burnham stated, "We invested in DuckDuckGo because we became convinced that it was not only possible to change the basis of competition in search, it was time to do it."[13][15] In addition, Trisquel, Linux Mint, and the Midori web browser switched to use DuckDuckGo as their default search engine.[16] DuckDuckGo gains revenue via advertisements and affiliate programs.[17] The search engine is written in Perl[18] and runs on nginx, FreeBSD, and Linux.[3][2][19] DuckDuckGo is built primarily upon search APIs from various vendors. Because of this, TechCrunch characterized the service as a "hybrid" search engine.[20][21] Weinberg explained the beginnings of the name with respect to the children's game duck, duck, goose. He said of the origin of the name: "Really it just popped in my head one day and I just liked it. It is certainly influenced/derived from duck duck goose, but other than that there is no relation, e.g., a metaphor."[22] DuckDuckGo was featured on TechCrunch's Elevator Pitch Friday in 2008,[20] and it was a finalist in the 2008 BOSS Mashable Challenge.[23]
In 2010, DuckDuckGo began using privacy to differentiate itself from its competitors.[24]
In July 2010, Weinberg started a DuckDuckGo community website (duck.co) to allow the public to report problems, discuss means of spreading the use of the search engine, request features, and discuss open sourcing the code.[25] The company registered the domain name ddg.gg on February 22, 2011,[26] and acquired duck.com in December 2018,[27][28][29] which are used as shortened URL aliases that redirect to duckduckgo.com, and is also used as the domain for their e-mail protection service.[30][31][32]
Features[edit]
Search results[edit]
DuckDuckGo's results are a compilation of "over 400" sources according to itself, including Bing, Yahoo! Search BOSS, Wolfram Alpha, Yandex, and its own web crawler (the DuckDuckBot); but none from Google.[70][3][71][72][61] It also uses data from crowdsourced sites such as Wikipedia, to populate knowledge panel boxes to the right of the search results.[72][73]
DuckDuckGo offers a Lite version of its search for browsers without Javascript capabilities.[74]
Weinberg has refined the quality of his search engine results by deleting search results for companies he believes are content mills, such as eHow, which publishes 4,000 articles per day produced by paid freelance writers, which Weinberg states to be "low-quality content designed specifically to rank highly in Google's search index". DuckDuckGo also filters pages with substantial advertising.[75] DuckDuckGo down ranks websites deemed to have low journalistic standards.[76]
Instant Answers[edit]
In addition to the indexed search results, DuckDuckGo displays relevant results, called instant answers, on top of the search page. These Instant Answers are collected from either third party APIs or static data sources like text files. The Instant Answers are called zeroclickinfo because the intention behind these is to provide what users are searching for on the search result page itself so that they do not have to click any results to find what they are looking for. Instant answers are created by and maintained by a community of over 1,500 open source contributors. This community has come to be known as DuckDuckHack.[77] As of July 2019, there were 1236 Instant Answers active.[78]
In the DuckDuckHack documentation, four types of Instant Answers are described: Goodies, Spices, Fatheads, and Longtails. These types of Instant Answer extensions are differentiated by how their data is retrieved. Goodies do not retrieve data from a third party API, whereas Spices do. Goodies instead use some form of the aforementioned static data sources, such as text files or JSON files. Fathead Instant Answers are key-value answers hosted on DuckDuckGo's backend. Fathead key-value pairs function similarly to a trigger for showing the respective Instant Answer. Longtail Instant Answers are full text queries to a DuckDuckGo database of articles. Paragraphs or snippets from any matching articles are returned, and the section that matches the user's query is highlighted.[79]
In March 2023, DuckDuckGo added DuckAssist to Instant Answers. Using large language models from OpenAI and Anthropic, DuckAssist generates answers to users' questions by scanning online encyclopedias (like Wikipedia and Britannica).[80][81]
Tor access[edit]
In August 2010, DuckDuckGo introduced anonymous searching, including an exit enclave,[82] for its search engine traffic using Tor network and enabling access through a "Tor hidden service" (onion service).[83] 3g2upl4pq6kufc4m.onion 
(Accessing link help)[84][85](deprecated) was the DuckDuckGo v2 onion service on Tor.[86][87][88] This allows anonymity by routing traffic through a series of encrypted relays. Weinberg stated: "I believe this fits right in line with our privacy policy. Using Tor and DDG, you can now be end to end anonymous with your searching. And if you use our encrypted homepage, you can be end to end encrypted as well."[89]
In July 2021, DuckDuckGo introduced a new v3 onion service, with a new link: duckduckgogg42xjoc72x3sjasowoarfbgcmvfimaftt6twagswzczad.onion (Accessing link help).[90]
Bangs[edit]
DuckDuckGo includes "!Bang" keywords, which give users the ability to search on specific third-party websites – using the site's own search engine if applicable. As of August 2020, 13,564 "bangs" for a diverse range of internet sites are available.[91] In December 2018, around 2,000 "bangs" were deleted. Some of them were deleted due to being broken, while others, such as searches of pirated content sites, were deleted for liability reasons.[92]
Privacy[edit]
DuckDuckGo does not track its users.[93][94] DuckDuckGo keeps favicons anonymous.[95] Your location is never sent to DuckDuckGo servers, even when you allow a third party to collect your geolocation.[96] DuckDuckGo offers limited third-party tracking protection, third-party cookie protection, CNAME cloaking protection, limited device fingerprint protection from third parties, link tracking removal, Google AMP replacement, and do-not-track requests.[97]
Source code[edit]
Some of DuckDuckGo's source code is free and open-source software hosted at GitHub under the Apache 2.0 License,[102] but the core is proprietary.[103] DuckDuckGo also hosted DuckDuckHack, a sister site for organizing open source contributions and community projects. The search engine's Instant Answers are open source[104] and are maintained on GitHub, where anyone can view the source code. As of August 31, 2017, DuckDuckHack was placed on maintenance mode; as such, only pull requests for bug fixes will be approved.[77]
