Current calculations place the search engine at 1,468,690 average daily queries.ĭue to the search engine’s success, Founder Gabriel Weinberg announced two major projects underway today that include better programming and speed. The company is even open sourcing more heavily and improving entry points. It just passed the 1 million mark last month, jumping from 630,441 average daily queries in January 2011 to 1,041,493 in February. The chart to the right illustrates DuckDuckGo’s momentum. It started as a privacy-conscious alternative to Google. The technology is simple: DuckDuckGo gathers results from crowd-sourced websites, such as Wikipedia and direct-competitor Bing, to display a host of search findings. Read more about DuckDuckGo in The Washington Post.DuckDuckGo entered the search engine game in 2008, and it is averaging almost 1.5 million average direct queries per day and announcing system upgrades less than four years later. “For search engines like us that are trying to actively allow consumers to switch, (or) choose an alternative, they’re making it unreasonably complicated to do so and confusing consumers,” Weinberg said. These actions have had a significant impact on DuckDuckGo, which recorded a 10 percent drop in retained new users on Chrome. A highlighted button also provided a rather obvious option to restore Google’s browser. Weinberg alleges that in August 2020, the technology behemoth tweaked the prompts to be even more blatant about their purpose.Ĭhange-of-browser inhibitors included requiring users to answer if they would “change back to Google search” after adding the DuckDuckGo extension. He also claims it discourages them from changing the default search engines on Chrome, Google’s web browser. He said Google has been using misleading notifications for years to get web searchers to disable its rival browser extensions. Gabriel Weinberg, the CEO of Paoli-based DuckDuckGo, a privacy-minded search engine, alleges that Google is manipulating browser extensions to favor its products and stifle competitors, writes Cristiano Lima for The Washington Post.Īccording to Weinberg, Google is deploying manipulative design features to trick users into casting aside rival technology.