Paoli-based DuckDuckGo is a search engine that doesn’t track its users the way Google does. Its niche is private, anonymous internet search and it has plenty of users who like its philosophy. DuckDuckGo just announced that it will be giving away $25,000 to support each of nine open source projects, or $225,000 total. Last year, it gave away $125,000. One of the projects DuckDuckGo donated $25,000 is for The Tor Project’s services focused on protecting user privacy.
— The Tor Project (@torproject) May 3, 2016 DuckDuckGo, though no match for the search behemoth, Google has been particularly successful with niche users. In 2015, DuckDuckGo performed 3 billion searches according to its report. One of the main advantages with DuckDuckGo is that it doesn’t gather information about you to sell ads to marketeers, like Google does. Instead, it’s part of the Microsoft/Bing/Yahoo ad network (as are many other sites) and shows generic ads based on more general stuff, such as the fact that you’re using English.
