DATA ISSUES_
DUCK CALL
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DESPITE A WHIMSICAL NAME, DUCKDUCKGO OFFERS A SERIOUS PRIVACYORIENTED ALTERNATIVE TO GOOGLE SEARCHES _ BY ED MCKINLEY
google search for “luckbox” put a betting site at the top of the results and the magazine’s homepage in the No. 2 spot. A DuckDuckGo search reversed the order, placing the magazine first and the betting site second. That was good enough for us. But the advantages of DuckDuckGo don’t end with our admittedly prejudiced preference for the results of a single search. DDG was born out of concern for data privacy, an issue of grave importance to informed internet users, says Gabriel Weinberg, the company’s founder and CEO. “Our mission is to show the world that protecting your privacy can be simple, and our North Star is to raise the standard of trust online,” Weinberg tells Luckbox. “We’re working to make privacy the rule, not the exception.” DDG promotes privacy because it doesn’t track, record, exploit or sell its users’ search results. Many other search engines, including Google, do the opposite. That penchant for privacy pits DDG, a David with 0.61% market share last year, against Google, a Goliath that controls 92.04% of the business, according to the statcounter.com website. DDG brought in $100 million in revenue last year, but Google’s dominance paid off handsomely, earning the company $181.7 billion in 2020—most of it from targeted advertising. Google can charge plenty for ads because it uses the mountain of data that’s been collected on just about everyone in the world to “customize” search results. When two people use Google to search for “luckbox,” they don’t necessarily get the same results. Google tailors the list of suggested sites to fit each user’s past online activities.
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Luckbox | November 2021
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