DuckDuckGo Raises $10M

I have been using DDG for about a year now, although I had tried using it years ago. It works fine for simple queries( e.g. search name of company rather than typing out url). But I basically have !g programmed into my fingers for everything more complicated. Many times when I don&#x27;t find the results I am looking for, I subconsciously assume that google would be able to find them. This is in comparison to when I cannot find something on google, I assume the website owner either sucks at SEO or it doesn&#x27;t exist. I am rooting for DDG, but it is going to be really hard for them to make up the literal cognitive difference in my mindset.<p>Side note, if they get bought out by a big player, I will feel like my use of them for the last year has been for naught.

DDG has the same business plan as major providers(selling keywords), but they do it in a way that is more respectful of your autonomy.<p>Reasons I use DDG exclusively:<p>- I prefer their business plan. Keyword ads still appear on search results page, but I am not psychographically modeled and retargeted after I close the browser session.<p>- It performs fast and I like the visual appearance.<p>- No AMP results. (Google does not give you a way to disable AMP, at all, which surprised me. I do not like AMP because it does not feel right on iOS.)<p>- It integrates Instant Answers and has surprised me with some Stack Overflow&#x2F;Superuser excerpts.<p>- Mobile search is now geo-aware (again, crucially, in a way that does not build a ad targeting profile on me over time).<p>- The scale of the company is smaller and the CEO seems like a real, reachable person.

&gt; DuckDuckGo appears healthy and quite content with making money off of keyword-based ads alone.<p>This makes perfect sense. Show an ad related to what a person is interested in and looking at. When I did adsense stuff a long, long time ago, I seem to remember that Google would request a copy of the page, and then tailor the ads to the content of the page. There was absolutely no interest at all in &quot;Who&quot; was looking at the page. It seems to me there is still a tremendous amount of money that could be made with only that use case.

DuckDuckGo is fantastic on mobile (iPhone). It feels way faster than Google for me — part of that is not getting the &quot;Can I use your location?&quot; pop-ups which then trigger a re-search.<p>Plus there&#x27;s no AMP junk in the results! And links are real links — when you copy them you get the URL, not some huge tracking string.<p>Occasionally I&#x27;ve felt like I&#x27;m not getting good results so have gone to Google to repeat the search. There hasn&#x27;t yet been a case where that&#x27;s helped, so I&#x27;ve stopped doing it.

DuckDuckGo&#x27;s killer feature to me is that I can always depend on it to be in English. Google annoyingly always changes the language based on the location of the IP address you&#x27;re connecting from. It&#x27;s very annoying when traveling.

I find that DDG is good for about 80% of what I want. But the other 20%, especially dev queries, I muscle memory type in !g.<p>Is there a bang for the type of query answer we are looking for?<p>Such as for &#x27;Ruby gems&#x27; I can use !dev so the engine knows to ignore sites like Ruby Gemstone and focus on dev only.<p>I know there is !so and !gh, but I am looking for something that dynamically combines them and other dev resources as they fall in and out of search favor.

I tried using DuckDuckGo many times over the past few years, but the results never enticed me to stay.<p>But for the past 3-4 months, it&#x27;s been my default. Haven&#x27;t felt the need to use Google Search even once!<p>Big props to Gabriel Weinberg and team!

I switched to DDG ~5 years ago for two reasons: 1. Infinite scroll, and 2. Smaller ads (which can be entirely disabled).<p>I stayed with DDG because: 1. !bang is addictive, and 2. Dark mode.<p>Also, early on I had some thoughts on how to improve DDG, so I emailed the owner and he responded thoughtfully. I can&#x27;t imagine that happening with Google.

The article says that DDG was profitable since 2014.<p>I wonder just <i>how</i> profitable it is, and how soon would it be able to return the investments. A high investment load means that a company strives for an exit. I won&#x27;t like DDG to be bought by whatever party.

At Terms of Service; Didn&#x27;t Read, we were one of a whole host of privacy-focused projects that received a donation from DuckDuckGo: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;spreadprivacy.com&#x2F;duckduckgo-privacy-challenge-2018" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;spreadprivacy.com&#x2F;duckduckgo-privacy-challenge-2018</a><p>Thus, however successful DDG will be, at least it will have supported quite a few other projects in its wake.

Whether or not DDG is &quot;beating&quot; Google, they are successfully <i>competing</i> with Google on G&#x27;s home turf. That&#x27;s pretty impressive.

DDG is getting better with time. I completely switched to DDG about 2 years ago.<p>I tried Google search recently and found its results are less relevant and presented in an awkward form where I cannot copy result&#x27;s URL (searched for a technical paper). DDG is clear winner.

I&#x27;m I the only one who&#x27;s surprised to see how small this round was?<p>The modern SV economy seems to be built around $100M seed rounds and valuations in the low billions, pre-launch.

The fact DDG can even get to the ballpark, let alone compete against an opponent whose budget is 3 orders of magnitude larger is astounding, and should be applauded.

In 2015 I tried using DDG for programming questions and the results were inferior to my co-worker who used Google Search. Even without the comparison I could tell DDG was inferior due to how few answers I&#x27;d find. I recently switched away from Google services to Firefox, Fastmail, and DDG for privacy reasons. I no longer have issues finding answers within the top 4-5 results and if I do, Google almost never has the answer anyway.

Fun learning from this article: the Ontario Municipal Employee Retirement System does its own venture deals (including this one!) and has invested in a ton of startups:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.crunchbase.com&#x2F;organization&#x2F;omers-ventures#section-investments" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.crunchbase.com&#x2F;organization&#x2F;omers-ventures#secti...</a>

The one thing I find really painful is when I want a localized search like searching for &quot;[chain resturant name] grubhub&quot; and I get results half way across the country. Other than that it&#x27;s great.

I&#x27;ve been giving DDG a try for a few weeks. A small thing - the absence of Past Year in the time searches is a surprisingly big annoyance. Adding to the annoyance factor is how easy it would be for that to be added and especially since they are apparently aware of it - <i>P.S. We are working on implementing the past year as well!</i>[1]<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;duck.co&#x2F;help&#x2F;features&#x2F;dates" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;duck.co&#x2F;help&#x2F;features&#x2F;dates</a>

DDG&#x27;s bang search is by far my favorite feature, I&#x27;ve been using DDG for about 4 years and being about to just !w or !m for common stuff is a huge win.

i gave ddg a few tries back then but two months ago i&#x27;ve switched to it for good. on all my browsers it is the default search engine. on android, chrome does not let you set it as default engine so i also switched to firefox on mobile. not being tracked is a good feeling. i also never had a problem with search results, especially for development.

DuckDuckGo is a great search engine, I&#x27;ve been using it for a while. The only thing that stops me from fully moving to DuckDuckGo is eseential DOM load speed. Google search results page loading speed is two times faster.<p>DuckDuckGo needs to hire a Frontend wizard that will address all the issues with load speed and hopefully make it quicker than competitors.

I&#x27;ve been lately trying to get myself accustomed to DDG, and while I appreciate the bang feature immensely, I find myself spending more and more time using !g to revert to Google Search. It probably has something to do with the fact that I search a lot in Japanese as well as English; While English search results are somewhat good, DDG&#x27;s Japanese search results are just plain bad. I suspect the similar is also true with other non-English languages as well. Hope the new money gets spent on improving search results on non-English.

I&#x27;ve been using DDG for several years now. I pretty rarely fall back to google for something these days and, when I do, they usually don&#x27;t have the result I&#x27;m looking for either.

I have been using it for more than year. I occasionally switch to google in extreme needs. I hope it improves more in coming days. Good going DuckDuckGo.

I switched to DDG over a year ago. It works for my purposes. The only problem is they do not use Google maps so I have to switch when looking for directions.<p>For research though I switched to Yippy. Their business model is selling replacements for Google Search Appliance which is at EOL in a couple of months. So they can sustain themselves while providing a free search tool.

I use DuckDuckGo as default... from time to time I need to use Google but I try to keep it at minimum. It&#x27;s not about privacy, it&#x27;s because I like Google less every fucking time that they do update on any of their products. Look at Google News, it was simple and nice before, now looks like it is a part of Yahoo.

For a company that aims to do ethical businesses, they have an uphill better. But it helps that they have such a great search engine. I&#x27;ve been using ddc for a few years exclusively and I think I get better results. Some of my old google-fu works, unlike new google, which seems to ignore it now.

I use DDG on a daily basis. Out of ignorance, I haven’t used the bang switches, but I think I have been satisfied with the quality of the search results to the point where I very rarely go to google anymore.<p>I am happy to have an alternative to google search even if the effect is too small to be measured.

I&#x27;m a recent DDG convert. However I&#x27;m pretty locked into the Google Maps platform. I&#x27;ve used stars and &quot;want to go&quot; for years. Those don&#x27;t translate over to DDG even on their Google Maps option for maps. Anyone know of a work around?

It’s still such a poor choice of name.

I’m probably one of the few who do this, but I use Google Chrome with DDG. I really just have a much easier time on Chrome than I do on Firefox, and I’m optimistic that my Internet history is not being piped to and stored on Google’s servers somewhere.

Not bad for general queries, but still not suited to specific, local and timely queries - at least, in the UK, anyway. Even whilst searching with country-specific settings, most results tend to be American.<p>Also, I miss pagination of results pages :(

Love using them, hopefully with this money they will finally implement the date filter to allow for the last year instead of just the last month. Very important when searching for the latest coding implementations of a new version.

Another happy DDG user here. But I always wonder - DDG is basically an aggregator, it doesn&#x27;t have its own general index. Isn&#x27;t there a danger that Google and Bing will just close the faucet to it one day?

They seem to be doing well, generally: &lt;<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;duckduckgo.com&#x2F;traffic&gt;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;duckduckgo.com&#x2F;traffic&gt;</a>

I think either Google will awe us again and become stronger or duckduckgo will figure out a way to finally give us better search results.

am i the only one that is just too lazy to type DuckDuckGo.com? i feel i may go there more if it was just ddg.com or something short

What&#x27;s DDG&#x27;s moat? Its search index is bing so they don&#x27;t have significant own tech. Is it just the brand?

Firefox focus and DDG is the best combination on mobile. Leave no cookies behind.

I am using DDG exclusively for over a year now. It works realy fine.

DuckDuckGo claims to be all for privacy. What it doesn&#x27;t tell users is that it is just a wrapper around Bing search results. The $10M they plan to spend is just going to increase search traffic to Bing.

It&#x27;s pretty bad for non english content.

i have used duckduckgo for years, they are really good :)

Maybe they could buy ddg.com with (part of) this money?

What happens to the pension fund if DDG fails?

When I noticed that DDG is using (among other sources) Yandex.ru (Russian search engine) index I&#x27;ve stopped using it.<p>It is not a question of privacy but rather a question of trust and bias. Of course YMMV.