Our portfolio company DuckDuckGo launched a new version yesterday. Gabe wrote a short post explaining what’s new.
DuckDuckGo is on a tear and tripled direct searches in the past year.
There are a number of reasons why more and more people turn to DuckDuckGo to do their searches. First and foremost, it’s DDG’s privacy promise:
We don’t collect or share personal information.
But it also the fact that DDG is getting better and better every day. Through DuckDuckHack, anyone can make DDG better. And it is a lot better these days.
I have used DDG as my default search engine on all of my desktop browsers since before we made our investment in the fall of 2011. I would love to do the same on my mobile browsers but cannot do that yet. I used to use the !g extension on DDG searches to route them to Google at least 33% of the time. I find that I am doing that less than 20% of the time now. It may not be possible to do search better than google, but if DDG can do private search almost as good as Google, I think that will turn into a very significant business in time. It already is looking like that’s the case.
