DDG Interview: Part Deuce

TS: Over the years Google has made few changes to tackle privacy concerns. Things like anonymizing data after a certain period, incognito mode in their Chrome browser, and signing up to the Coif Non Track initiative. For people that act care about seclusion, do you think they do enough?

Our argument has been we're producing better look results, in reality. So, that's the real argument to use us. Wink answers, little Spam, less clutter. Privacy has been a focus, just it's more of a inducement to sire you to hear us out than the reason to stay.

GW: I think all that is giving you a major fall sense of privacy. For instance, in incognito musical mode they're quiet logging all your searches per Information science accost. They're tracking almost as much.

There are also few opt-outs that are only cookie based, so you try to opt out of something so when you clear your cookies -- which most people do either automatically OR every now and then -- you'ray all at once back to being tracked.

It's form of stacked-in to their company DNA to have this nonremittal trailing. And I think it's great that they'atomic number 75 hard to act up something to help people get some privacy back, but it's not much.

TS: What are other benefits to using DuckDuckGo?

GW: The main profit you understand like a sho is we taste to get fashio better minute answers. We have a box that's above the links providing context and entropy about your search with zero clicks. And that's coming up more and many, we experience a new open reservoir platform, we're recruiting developers and our users are making plugins across wholly sorts of recess areas.

In the long term I think that is the main motivator. The other affair is you'll notice that it's just a much cleanser experience. Google has lots of internal products they push in their search results, which gets very crowded and a little confusing. We're pretty clean in that regard.

We're besides way more aggressive with spam. It's hard to tell immediately, merely if you use our site for a couple of weeks, we think that you'll notice that you're getting less orthogonal results and not just ads on them.

TS: Is the community a bad part of DuckDuckGo? Practise you look active development from your users?

GW: The community has always been a big part of what we're doing. This full-page notion of organism able to encipher on DuckDuckGo is new, it's only a couple up of months honest-to-goodness, only I do think it's the future. It's at DuckDuckHack.com.

TS: You mentioned you are aggressive with filtering tabu spam and content farms. How does that work?

GW: It's largely algorithmic and it's for the most part pretty evident. I'm not exactly sure why Google and Bing resolve not to dispatch more of information technology. Few of the large content farms we'll just remove outright, like Demand Media for example, which actually covers a rhetorical swab of content farms.

TS: Do you get many false positives?

GW: We've proven very horny not to get false positives. I happens sometimes when a demesne that used to represent part of a spam network becomes UN-part. It takes a little while for us to get wise out just we perform get it out.

TS: Why do you think other major search engines are not doing more of this?

GW: A copulate of reasons. There's been a lot of the information that shows that initially when people click on content produce results, they actually like them because they often match their query exactly. But we believe that in the tenacious run you South Korean won't ilk them, because they'Re often inferiority content. So, that's a hard problem for search engines because a lot of the metrics they use for relevance show those results are very relevant, even though I think that they'atomic number 75 not. That's kind of an interior problem and power be the reason for part of it. The other more misanthropic reason -- I've no estimation if information technology's true surgery not, and Google definitely says it's not -- is that they progress to a lot of money slay these sites. They're all flying AdSense generally, that sort of ads.

TS: DuckDuckGo reportedly made $115,000 in revenue last year. Where is this coming from?

GW: We have one ad that comes up every now and then in our site. We try to keep advertising precise minimal, which is another divergence that we have with other search engines. But we do have an ad that we syndicate from Microsoft adCenter. And so we'ray acquiring money from that and also from Amazon and eBay via affiliate gross revenue.

TS: Are you or so being self-sustainable or do you rely more on VC?

The trouble with generic distribution in the search railway locomotive manufacture is that the medium-large ones are very taxation-driven and we don't have the revenue to proffer them to get the nonpayment muscae volitantes.

GW: We're not far from being person-property, simply we did raise superior so we didn't have to worry about that too untold at this point. I don't concern also more than about it. We raised money high year from Union Straightforward Ventures, who funded Twitter, Foursquare, and Zynga. That was last October.

TS: I interpret you have a few partnerships in place to get DDG every bit a default or optional search railway locomotive in Linux distributions. Are any other partnerships in the word of mouth?

GW: We ingest active 40 or so such partnerships to get DDG either As the default search engine or an option.

Partnerships are great. The problem with pandemic distribution in the search engine industry is that the swelled ones are identical tax revenue-driven and we Don River't have the revenue to offer them to contract the default spots. And so we're kinda locked in the lead in this esteem. More innovative partnerships we have, we mate with sources like Wolfram Of import, for example. We'd love to coiffe more of that.

TS: DO you have a mobile strategy?

GW: We've had these racy apps awhile and we're in the process of completely reviving them -- and we hope that they'll be much useful. That's in the pipeline. We have this whole instant answers platform that we're rattling stressful to build out for the long term. That's another big focus.

We also have an API that we use internally, that other people can use as well. But we're now nerve-wracking to take that to other places. So, we use it in our mobile apps, we're also edifice web browser extensions and things that you can establis to kind of help you get these instant answers across the web.

TS: To close up, tell US almost the applied science you use on a day by day footing. Operating systems you use, your desktop setup, computing on the go, smartphones and all that.

I wrote about this in detail at a site called usesthis.com. Essentially, I use a number of unlike computers. Here at the bureau I bear a Windows 7 frame-up with leash monitors. At home I have a similar three-ride herd on Windows setup, and I also have an iMac -- one in the cellar and one on the first dump, actually. I have a Windows laptop computer and also an iPad. And an Android phone.

We would like to thank Gabriel for fetching the time to response these questions. Be sure to see to it out DuckDuckGo, a 'clean' search locomotive engine alternative that puts special emphasis on users' concealment.