Supposedly liberal Google was censoring supposedly conservative content. Perhaps part of DuckDuckGo’s appeal to them was the privacy, but for many, the key reason was that they thought DuckDuckGo’s search results were unbiased. But this time period also corresponds with an anti-Big Tech crusade many on the right took up as they believed that they were increasingly being censored on Big Tech platforms. What caused this sudden rise? There was a growing awareness about internet privacy during those years, which must have been a factor. In recent years, it’s expanded its privacy mission beyond search, with a mobile browser app and plans to release a desktop version soon. But it’s also the second-most used search engine in some places, and in late 2020, it raised $100 million from investors. By comparison, Google, by far the most-used search engine, is believed to handle trillions of search inquiries a year (Google doesn’t release its search statistics), so DuckDuckGo is still a mere fraction of the search market. According to DuckDuckGo’s own figures, annual search queries ballooned from 5.9 billion in 2017 to 35.3 billion last year. But DuckDuckGo grew slowly - until about 2018, when it started growing very quickly. It stopped tracking its users’ search histories, and privacy advocates praised it. By 2010, it latched onto privacy as the thing to differentiate it from its competitors, Google especially. It didn’t help that the content DuckDuckGo was demoting and calling disinformation was Russian state media, whose side some in the right-wing contingent of DuckDuckGo’s users were firmly on.Ī little history: DuckDuckGo launched in 2008. Weinberg’s tweet announcing the change generated thousands of comments, many of them from conservative-leaning users who were furious that the company they turned to in order to get away from perceived Big Tech censorship was now the one doing the censoring.
DuckDuckGo was accused of betraying a user base it unintentionally cultivated but didn’t exactly discourage. Many on the right adopted it as their pro-free-speech search engine of choice, a mission DuckDuckGo never actually had but had now, somehow, violated. It’s yet another example of the impossible situation some platforms have found themselves in: By not taking a public stance against misinformation or content deemed to be harmful, DuckDuckGo was taking a stance. “Privacy is a human right and transcends politics,” Weinberg tweeted.īut DuckDuckGo, it turns out, does not transcend politics. This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.įor more newsletters, check out our newsletters page. By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice.
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