The search engine business is about to be shaken up by a scrappy third player.
Search has been a two horse race with Google in the dominant position and Bing existing as a weaker competitor. Almost nobody talks about Yahoo! anymore for search.
But the third player you might be talking about soon is called DuckDuckGo.com.
I got a tip about this search engine and have been using it instead of Google. Why? Because it delivers cleaner search results with fewer advertisements and does not track you.
DuckDuckGo was started by 33-year-old Gabe Weinberg with no real business model. He’s still trying to figure out to make real money from his creation.
Weinberg thought it was crazy that ads pop up on Google so prominently and they track you everywhere you go and then serve you more ads based on what you search. He just wanted a straight, clean search and that’s what he developed.
DuckDuckGo also has an Android app, so that’s what I use on my phone. In addition, there’s an iPhone app.
Will DuckDuckGo ever make money? Who knows. Weinberg sold a prior startup for millions, so he’s already set for life. But it will be interesting to see how it plays out. And I’m enjoying the search results in the meantime.
