With new headlines that the NSA has been profiling people online travels (the irony of saying this online isn’t lost on me), it’s very exciting to see how it has affected search engines. As privacy concerns have arisen from the situation with PRISM, Google, Yahoo and Bing have seen a small subset of the market diverge to other search engines with stricter privacy policies. One would wait for that the media outrage would translate to a broader shift away from the search giants. Perhaps educating people about another search engines is just beginning though, as momentum seems to be picking up daily.
As more and more news stories release how Google tries to mix the unique information it keeps on every searcher into their search results, and tailor these to be more and more personal, many more people are looking for sites that keep searches totally nameless. Two such sites come to mind. Philadelphia based DuckDuckGo.com and the European based StartPage.com both proclaim to be search engines that respect privacy. Each has around 3 million searches per day.
DuckDuckGo in particular has seen its traffic rise by 2 million searches per day in the last two weeks. The website’s isolation policy states that it will not retain any personal information such as IP address, or share a user’s search record to other sites, has generated just under 3.1 million direct searches per day from June 1 to the 17. This is compared to the 1.8 million per day for May. The search engine tweeted: “It took 1445 days to get 1 million searches, 483 days to get 2 million searches, and then just 8 days to pass 3M searches.” The growth was detailed on DuckDuckGo’s public traffic page, which illustrates a search growth spike since the NSA story first insolvent in early June.
So for a website to rank on DuckDuckGo, it’s best not to slab their bot. The same “great content” advice that the other search engines suggest works here too, as DuckDuckGo seeks to answer questions directly, so having FAQ pages and other information that users may want to know about products and services will surely help. Mentions from social sites, useful sites, and trusted sites will also help in a site’s ranking because DuckDuckGo’s rankings are a hybrid of 100’s of APIs from other websites. Weinburg says “We basically use the ranking of the causal APIs, and then re-rank, omit, merge etc. on top of that–and the argument is that it comes out better on the other end.” So if a site ranks well on other search engines, it will most likely rank well on DuckDuckGo too.
Two things struck me as I did the research on how to rank for DuckDuckGo. First, the results that the search engine delivers are outstanding (when you don’t want personal or local results) and unbiased. Second, Google and other search engines have been more and more often asked to disclose information to government agencies and lawyers. The Google transparency report shows a big increase over the last few years. Google has a lot of data about you and it must disclose this data if requested by authorities.
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