This means it can’t sell personalised advertising, and it can’t deliver personalised search results. DuckDuckGo is therefore undercutting Google “on price” by not collecting any information, not storing your searches, and not tracking you across the web. Google Search is free at the point of use, but the company makes more than $100bn (£76bn) a year from advertising based on tracking and targeting users. The blog offers practical advice, which includes suggesting alternatives to other Google products. It follows through with a Firefox extension, DuckDuckGo Privacy Essentials, its Privacy Weekly newsletter, a blog at, and annual donations to privacy causes. Indeed, it describes itself as “the internet privacy company” where Google is obviously “the internet advertising company”. Photograph: PR imageīut Google has a weakness, privacy, which DuckDuckGo attacks. One of DuckDuckGo’s billboard ads targeting Google. (Baidu dominates in China and Yandex is popular in Russia.) Google therefore looks impregnable, unless it loses its grip on the advertising market – no money, no search – or the US government intervenes. This appears to be impossible with Google Search, because its price is zero and its reach is almost unlimited. Theoretically, upstarts can displace incumbents by using new technologies to offer an (initially) inferior but cheaper product to a larger market, as described in Clayton Christensen’s book, The Innovator’s Dilemma. Google Search soon became one of the web’s category-defining behemoths along with, for example, Amazon, eBay, Facebook, Gmail, Instagram, YouTube and Wikipedia.ĭominant web properties can decline dramatically – it happened to AOL and Yahoo, as Data Is Beautiful’s animated video shows – but most survive for a long time. Adding Gmail, Maps and the Chrome browser reinforced its power. More users and more money led to bigger indexes of web pages, more servers and faster responses, along with better algorithms created by growing numbers of super-smart computer scientists.

Google’s prowess at search and its success at selling advertising created a virtuous circle. This was a bit of a jab at competitors, who were said to be “kind of exploiting the users to some extent”. Google was also attractive because its home page wasn’t stuffed with advertising, and because of the company’s old motto: “ Don’t be evil”. I was an early adopter and often recommended it. I will admit that Google is generally the best search engine.

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