DuckDuckgo: google’s tiniest, fiercest competitor
Google dominates global online search with its massive 67
percent market share. Three other giants—Microsoft’s Bing,
Yahoo!, and China-based Baidu—combine for another 31 percent of the market. That leaves a precious 2 percent sliver of the
market for dozens of other search engines trying to get a foothold. What’s more, Google and the other search giants have deep
pockets from their non-search businesses, letting them spend
abundantly to hold and grow market share. So how does a small
search engine wannabe compete against global powerhouses?
The best answer: It doesn’t—at least not directly. Instead, it finds
a unique market niche and runs where the big dogs don’t.
Enter DuckDuckGo, a plucky search engine start-up that’s
carving out its own special market niche. Instead of battling
Google and other giants head-on, DuckDuckGo provides a customer benefit that the market leaders can’t—privacy. Then it
energizes its unique niche with brand personality and user community. One look at DuckDuckGo’s icon—a quirky bow-tied
duck—gives you the sense that, like the small locomotive in the
classic children’s story, this might be “the little engine that could.”
DuckDuckGo isn’t just surviving in its niche, it’s exploding. The company is still comparatively tiny—it averages
about 9 million daily searches compared with Google’s nearly
6 billion. But DuckDuckGo’s daily search volume has surged
nearly tenfold in just the past three years, whereas Google’s
volume growth has lagged a bit.
When Gabriel Weinberg first launched DuckDuckGo seven
years ago, most people questioned his sanity. How could a
small upstart challenge the likes of mighty Google? But rather
than simply mimicking Google, Weinberg went a different
direction, developing a quality search engine with a key differentiating feature. DuckDuckGo now positions itself strongly
on “Smarter Search. Less Clutter. Real Privacy.”
DuckDuckGo focuses only on search. It offers a streamlined,
clutter-free, customizable user interface with far fewer sponsored
ads. As with other search engines, a DuckDuckGo query returns
link-by-link search results based on third-party sources, but the
results are filtered and reorganized to reduce spam. And beyond
the usual search-result links, for many searches, DuckDuckGo
provides direct “Instant Answers” in the form of zero-click information boxes above the search results. “When you do a search,
you generally want an answer,” says Weinberg. “It’s our job to
try to get an answer.” With Instant Answers, DuckDuckGo can
“help you get where you want to go in fewer clicks.”
The Instant Answer feature is a good one, so good in fact
that it has now been copied by Google and Bing. For example,
run a Google search for “davinci” or “how long is the great
wall” and along with the familiar list of blue links you’ll get a
white box containing a mini-biography of Leonardo Da Vinci
or displaying the length of the Great Wall of China (5,500.3
miles) and other interesting facts about it.
DuckDuckGo would tell you that its Instant Answers are often better. Its answers rely not just on third-party data sources but
also on the deep and diverse knowledge of its active, growing,
and loyal community of users and developers. DuckDuckGo’s
community provides additional power behind its searches. In a
Wikipedia-like fashion, DuckDuckGo users come up with ideas
about what the answers should be, suggest sources, and even
develop answers themselves. “DuckDuckGo is a search engine
driven by community—you’re on the team!” says the company.
“We’re not just servers and an algorithm. We’re so much more.”
Still, even though DuckDuckGo had Instant Answers long
before Google, Google’s response illustrates a typical nicher
dilemma. Market leaders usually have huge resources and can
quickly copy the start-up’s most popular features. “At any point,”
notes one analyst, “the Googles or Facebooks or Apples of the
world can just mimic what made you different, slam-dunking
your shattered dreams into the waste bin of tech history.”
Fortunately for DuckDuckGo, it has one crucial differentiator that the Googles of the world simply can’t mimic. Real privacy. Google’s entire model is built around personalization for
customers and behaviorally targeted marketing for advertisers.
That requires collecting and sharing data about users and their
searches. When you search on Google, the company knows and
retains in detail who you are, what you’ve searched for, and
when you’ve searched. It then integrates your online identity
and data with its services.
niche marketing: DuckDuckgo thrives in the shadows of giant
search engine competitors by giving its user community something the
googles of the world can’t mimic—real privacy.
Duck Duck Go, Inc.
By contrast, DuckDuckGo is specifically designed to be less
invasive and less creepy than its competitors. DuckDuckGo
doesn’t know who you are. It doesn’t log user IP addresses or
use cookies to track users over time or other online locations.
Users don’t have accounts. In fact, DuckDuckGo doesn’t even
save user search histories. Perhaps most important, when users
click on DuckDuckGo’s search results links, the linked Web
sites don’t receive any information generated by the search
engine. As one privacy advocate puts it, “DuckDuckGo is a
solid search engine that lets you surf the Web without leaving
behind a bunch of bread crumbs for Uncle Sam or anyone else
to follow. . . . The sites you visit are being kept at arm’s length.”
So DuckDuckGo has become the preferred search engine
for people concerned about online privacy, and that’s a fastgrowing group. “If you look at the logs of people’s search
sessions, they’re the most personal thing on the Internet,”
Weinberg says. “Unlike Facebook, where you choose what
to post, with search you’re typing in medical and financial
problems and all sorts of other things.” Today, more and more
people are thinking about the privacy implications of their
search histories. “It was extreme at the time,” says Weinberg of
DuckDuckGo’s early privacy positioning. But today, he adds,
“It’s become obvious why people don’t want to be tracked.”
How does DuckDuckGo make money? Last year, Google
made almost all of its $66 billion of revenue from searchrelated advertising, and most of that business involved largescale, behaviorally targeted advertising that relies on the very
tracking tools that DuckDuckGo shuns. However, even without
tracking users, smaller DuckDuckGo can be profitable. It simply focuses on the other part of Google’s business—delivering
contextual search ads based on the topic of the search itself.
So when users search for “curved OLED TVs,” DuckDuckGo
shows ads and links for TV manufacturers and retailers who’ve
paid for the associated key words.
Thus, in many ways, DuckDuckGo is David to Google’s
Goliath. But unlike David, DuckDuckGo isn’t out to slay the giant.
It knows that it can’t compete head-on with the Googles and Bings
of the world—it doesn’t even try. Then again, given the depth of
consumer engagement and loyalty that DuckDuckGo engenders
in its own small corner of the online search market, Google and
the other giants may find it difficult to compete with DuckDuckGo
for privacy-minded users. DuckDuckGo is currently the nation’s
11th-most-popular search engine based on unique monthly visitors. And as privacy grows in importance, so will DuckDuckGo.
That’s what niche marketing is all about—a well-defined
brand engaging a focused customer community with meaningful brand relationships that even large and resourceful competitors can’t crack. Smart niching has made DuckDuckGo
“Google’s tiniest, fiercest competitor,” says the analyst. “Our
vision is simple,” says DuckDuckGo. “To give you great search
results without tracking you.”
Sources: John Paul Titlow, “Inside DuckDuckGo, Google’s Tiniest, Fiercest
Competitor,” Fast Company, February 20, 2014, www.fastcompany
.com/3026698/inside-duckduckgo-googles-tiniest-fiercest-competitor;
“DuckDuckGo Direct Queries per Day,” https://duckduckgo.com/traffic.html,
accessed June 2015; “Privacy, DuckDuckGo, and the Battle for Search Market
Share,” Perioncodefuel, February 13, 2015, www.codefuel.com/blog/privacyduckduckgo-battle-search-market-share/; “Top 15 Most Popular Search
Engines—April 2015,” www.ebizmba.com/articles/search-engines, accessed
September 2015; and https://duckduckgo.com/about and www.netmarketshare
.com, accessed September 2015.