It's an alternative to datenkrake Google that does not track you and adds some neat features (bangs, keyboard navigation, etc.)
But the most important feature is that DuckDuckGo is the search engine that doesn't track you. We don't store your personal information and we don't sell you out to advertisers.
Our goal is to raise the standard of trust online, and so at DuckDuckGo you are not the product, search is. We think that's an important difference.
Disclaimer: DDG staff.
Any evidence to suggest that most people care? Most people just want the best search results, quickly.
Or is this a conscious decision to keep DDG serving a 'niche'.
> and so at DuckDuckGo you are not the product, search is.
Is DuckDuckGo a paid for product then? Users pay to search do they? If it's ad (Or VC) supported, then the user very much IS the product.
But is that information collected by you or anyone affiliated with you or given to anyone?
How about information that doesn't directly identify you, but could be used to identify you? (things like browser fingerprints, IPs, cookies, etc)
https://duckduckgo.com/privacy
We do not collect or share any information that can be used to personally identify you.
Do you have specific contracts that allows you to use their indexes anonymously or are you at their mercy?
So... who's paying?
Case A - if you type in "Car" we show an ad about cars. Advertisers are paying to appear at the top of that page. They do not know who you are or what you previously searched.
Case B - if you type in "Car" you are shown an ad about cars. Advertisers are paying to target based on your interest in cars, and possibly other websites you've visited, online actions you've taken, re-marketing pixels from third-party websites, or your affinity to other demographic groups.
In "Case A" the search page is the product.
In "Case B" you are the product.
Edit: Worth pointing out: as far as I am aware, they're using all the other search engines with an agreement with those companies, which makes it completely okay in my book to credit them as the one.
I credit my operating system to Canonical, even though the heavy lifting and behaving nicely on hardware is done by people contributing to Linux. Linux out of the box doesn't mean a thing to me. Bing out of the box doesn't mean a thing to me. DDG and Ubuntu do mean a lot to me.
That's a dangerous comparison to make because there isn't really any consensus* on which part of the stack to name the OS. For example, Linux is technically just the kernel. So most of the UX you deal with will be GNU and other user space tools. Depending on the DE you use, you might not even deal with much of Canonical's code. And Ubuntu does owe an awful lot to it's parent distribution, Debian.
In short, I get the point you're attempting to make but unfortunately your comparison is more contested than the original subject you were discussing.
* though many do advocate GNU/Linux
Canonical did a good thing of mashing it all together into a single product. DDG does the same for search in my book.
They've both outsourced the heavy lifting to some third party.
In DDG, Bing/Yahoo/Yandex does all of the heavy lifting. In Ubuntu, it's the Linux kernel. They would be nothing without those products they depend on. But they bundle that with like hundreds of different, smaller in scale products to offer a nice experience out of the box.
For smaller in scale companies that are trying to compete with big players (like Microsoft and Google), this does seem like a winning combination in my book.