However, beyond his dislike of spam, he also noticed how advertising tended to follow people around the web.
Six years ago surveillance wasn’t a hot topic of course so it is no surprise to learn that Weinberg’s initial motivation was to produce an engine that simply returned better results. On 29 February 2008 Weinberg incorporated DuckDuckGo (the name comes from the traditional children’s game duck, duck, goose) and launched the search engine in September of the same year. Together, these factors convinced him to start his own alternative.
The answer to his own search queries, he found, was to visit crowd sourced sites such as Wikipedia, and via word of mouth. In those pre-Penguin, pre-Panda days, he found Google search results less than inspiring, filled as they were with spam and over-optimized thin sites which seemed to offer little value to their visitors. The company was started on 29 October 2007 by Gabriel Weinberg who had recently sold The Names Database for $10m. Given the heightened awareness of personal online privacy generated by Edward Snowden’s leaks about government surveillance, that sounds like an incredibly enticing selling point. One of the smaller engines that has managed to gain some traction over the last few years is DuckDuckGo which markets itself as a search engine that doesn’t track its users. Beyond the big boys – Google, Bing and Yahoo – lies a plethora of smaller engines – some of which are specialized – and many more that are just struggling for attention. If you need to find something of interest, your first port of call will be a search engine, of which there are a great many. This post was originally published on December 12, 2014.
0 kommentar(er)
