DuckDuckGo is a search engine that, according to the manufacturer, does not collect any private information from its users. The search engine promises to not store IP addresses or search histories and no tracking conduct of visitors. Privacy is at the top of the DuckDuckGo philosophy. After Google, Bing and Yahoo, DuckDuckGo is the fourth most popular search engine in Germany.
The development of DuckDuckGo
In September 2008, DuckDuckGo was founded by the American Gabriel Weinberg. Weinberg studied physics and technology politics at MIT. After it was founded, he initially operated the search engine alone. Since 2011, DuckDuckGo has been invested through various investors and keyword-based advertising that customers can manage through Microsoft Advertising. Since then, the search engine has been continuously developed and improved. User inquiries are also taken into account. DuckDuckGo now records over 45 million search queries every day. Edward Snowden’s Wikileaks revelations in 2013 boosted DuckDuckGo’s popularity tremendously.
How does DuckDuckGo work?
According to biotionary, DuckDuckGo gets its search results from various sources. For one, the search engine has its own crawler, the DuckDuckBot. On the other hand, DuckDuckGo functions as a so-called meta search engine by using results from other search engines such as Yahoo and Bing. In addition, DuckDuckGo uses high-traffic websites such as Wikipedia as a source.
A special feature of DuckDuckGo are the so-called zero-click info boxes, which provide short information and related topics on the search term. DuckDuckGo is not only available as an add-on for many browsers, but also as an app for mobile devices. In addition to the normal search, an anonymous search over the Tor network is possible.
DuckDuckGo is programmed in Perl and runs on nginx web servers. Parts of the program code were published as free software on GitHub.
The main difference between DuckDuckGo and other search engines is the transparent promise made by search engine operators regarding the privacy of their users:
- no collection of user data
- no saving of IP addresses, search histories and personal data
- no tracking of users
- no sharing of personal data with other websites or advertisers
- no tracking with ads
- a transparent data protection declaration
- a secure encryption of the data traffic between user and search engine
DuckDuckGo and SEO
The same applies to DuckDuckGo as to all other search engines. Special SEO measures help a website to rank better. However, the measures can be adapted to DuckDuckGo.
As with all other search engines, the user-friendliness of the website also plays a role for DuckDuckGo. The user should experience an optimal customer experience and not be overloaded with popups and advertising. Responsiveness is also a factor that affects usability.
Building high-quality backlinks is also the alpha and omega of SEO for DuckDuckGo. The keyword is quality and not quantity. Since these indicate to the operators of DuckDuckGo on their website that high-quality links should be used, this seems to be a very important ranking criterion.
The local search engine optimization with DuckDuckGo behaves differently than with other search engines. Since DuckDuckGo does not know the exact location of its users, the search engine only roughly estimates where the visitor is using the IP address. However, since the display of local results is not so precise in this way, it is important that particular attention is paid to hyperlocal keywords when optimizing.
For the SEO of DuckDuckGo you should also keep an eye on other search engines such as Bing and Yahoo, since DuckDuckGo functions as a meta search engine, among other things. So what works SEO-technically for Bing and Yahoo can’t be wrong for DuckDuckGo.
As with other search engines, a Bang! apply at DuckDuckGo.
