DuckDuckGo: A Different Kind of Search
The recent trend in search engines has been to “personalize” searches for various reasons. For example, Google will change the search results based on past search history. Google has also been criticized for all the tracking they do, and in light of that, maybe it’s not so surprising that someone has made a new search engine that’s more stripped down, and more like how Google search used to be.
Gabriel Weinberg launched DuckDuckGo in 2008 with a goal along the lines of simply giving users answers. DuckDuckGo gets its results from a combination of other sites like Wikipedia, Yelp, Yahoo (Bing), Wolfram Alpha, and it’s own crawler called DuckDuckBot. From those sources, Weinberg somehow programmed a way to pick out the likely top search results and make them show up first (couldn’t really find his metric online).
There have been some criticisms regarding the name being silly, but people in general seem to be happy with the results DuckDuckGo produces as well as the fact that DuckDuckGo does no tracking whatsoever.
References/For more information:
DuckDuckGo About page: http://duckduckgo.com/about.html
http://ostatic.com/blog/duckduckgo-a-new-search-engine-built-from-open-source
http://blog.wolframalpha.com/2011/04/18/wolframalpha-and-duckduckgo-partner-on-api-binding-and-search-integration/
http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/ducking-google-in-search-engines/2012/11/09/6cf3af10-2842-11e2-bab2-eda299503684_story.html