He said of the origin of the name: 'Really it just popped in my head one day and I just liked it. Weinberg explained the beginnings of the name with respect to the children's game duck, duck, goose. Because of this, TechCrunch characterized the service as a 'hybrid' search engine. DuckDuckGo is built primarily upon search APIs from various vendors. The search engine is written in Perl and runs on nginx, FreeBSD, and Linux. DuckDuckGo gains revenue via advertisements and affiliate programs. Initially self-funded by Weinberg until October 2011, it was then 'backed by Union Square Ventures and a handful of angel investors.' 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.' In addition, Trisquel, Linux Mint, and the Midori web browser switched to use DuckDuckGo as their default search engine. Weinberg is an entrepreneur who previously launched Names Database, a now-defunct social network. History ĭuckDuckGo was founded by Gabriel Weinberg and launched on February 29, 2008, in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. The company name is a reference to the children's game duck, duck, goose.

The company is based in Paoli, Pennsylvania, in Greater Philadelphia and had 200 employees as of November 2022. Because of its anonymity, it is impossible to know how many people use DuckDuckGo. It uses various APIs of other websites to show quick results to queries and for traditional links it uses the help of its partners (mainly Bing) and its own crawler. DuckDuckGo does not show search results from content farms. September 25, 2008 14 years ago ( ) ĭuckDuckGo ( DDG) is an internet search engine that emphasizes protecting searchers' privacy and used to avoid the filter bubble of personalized search results.

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