DuckDuckGo is an American software company focused on online privacy, whose flagship product is a search engine of the same name.

Self-funded by Weinberg until October 2011, DuckDuckGo was then "backed by Union Square Ventures and a handful of angel investors.

"[11][12][13] 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.

"[11][13] In addition, Trisquel, Linux Mint, and the Midori web browser switched to use DuckDuckGo as their default search engine.

[35] In a lengthy profile in November 2012, The Washington Post indicated that searches on DuckDuckGo numbered up to 45,000,000 per month in October 2012.

The article concluded:"Weinberg's non-ambitious goals make him a particularly odd and dangerous competitor online.

"[9] GNOME released Web 3.10 on September 26, 2013, and starting with this version, the default search engine is DuckDuckGo.

[36][37] At its keynote speech at WWDC 2014 on September 18, 2014, Apple announced that DuckDuckGo would be included as an option for search on both iOS 8 and OS X Yosemite in its Safari browser.

that brought new features to all users of the search engine, including date filtering of results and additional site links.

[59] In September 2022, Debian package maintainers switched the default search engine in Chromium to DuckDuckGo for privacy reasons.

[60] In April 2024, DuckDuckGo introduced Privacy Pro, a paid subscription that includes a VPN, Personal Information Removal, Identity Theft Restoration.

[67][4][68][69][70] It also uses data from crowdsourced sites such as Wikipedia, to populate knowledge panel boxes to the right of the search results.

Using large language models from OpenAI and Anthropic, DuckAssist generates answers to users' questions by scanning online encyclopedias (like Wikipedia and Britannica).

[90] DuckDuckGo earns revenue by serving ads primarily from the Yahoo-Bing search alliance network.

[92][93] As of April 2024, DuckDuckGo also makes money from subscription fees paid to access Privacy Pro.

Major donations for 2021 included $200,000 to the Center for Information Technology Policy, $150,000 to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, $75,000 to European Digital Rights (EDRi) and $75,000 to The Markup.

[94] Some of DuckDuckGo's source code is free and open-source software hosted at GitHub under the Apache 2.0 License,[95] but the core is proprietary.

[96] DuckDuckGo also hosted DuckDuckHack, a sister site for organizing open source contributions and community projects.

[75][needs update] In a June 2011 article, Harry McCracken of Time commended DuckDuckGo, comparing it to his favorite hamburger restaurant, In-N-Out Burger: It feels a lot like early Google, with a stripped-down home page.

It just offers core Web search—mostly the "ten blue links" approach that's still really useful, no matter what its critics say ... As for the quality, I'm not saying that Weinberg has figured out a way to return more relevant results than Google's mighty search team.

It all feels meaty and straightforward and filler-free ...[98] The bare-bones approach cited in his quote has since changed; for instance, DuckDuckGo now has auto-completion, instant results, and a news tab.

[102] On March 1, 2022, in response to the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, DuckDuckGo paused its partnership with Yandex Search.

DuckDuckGo has defended itself from the criticism, saying that "The primary utility of a search engine is to provide access to accurate information.

Disinformation sites that deliberately put out false information to intentionally mislead people directly cut against that utility.

[54][55] In August 2022, DuckDuckGo began blocking Microsoft's trackers, saying that the policy preventing them from doing so no longer applied.

[108][56] Today, DuckDuckGo continues to open articles through MSN, similar to how Google utilizes AMP.

In December 2024, DuckDuckGo criticized Google's proposed remedies in an antitrust case related to search engine monopolies.

Gabriel Weinberg, CEO of DuckDuckGo, stated that the proposed measures "attempt to maintain the status quo" and are insufficient to grant smaller players fair access to markets.

Some[110] relate this claim to the exposure of PRISM and to the fact that other programs operated by the National Security Agency (NSA) were leaked by Edward Snowden.

[111] In response, Caleb Garling of the San Francisco Chronicle argued: "I think this thesis suffers from a few key failures in logic" because there had been an increase in traffic and because there was a lack of widespread awareness of the existence of DuckDuckGo.