adults said they considered it impossible to go through daily life without having data about them collected by companies. Digital privacy, the feature that has evolved into this little engine’s core attraction, is finally starting to freak people out enough for them to do something about it.
It’s just the right policy move for our society to have privacy.”īut something has started to happen, and 2021 may bring a breakthrough for DuckDuckGo after years of under-the-radar growth. “Search should be one of the most private spaces on the internet,” says Weinberg, “because people are typing in their most sensitive problems and issues. Google these days has 91 percent of the global search engine market, according to web analytics service Statcounter, which clocks DuckDuckGo at 0.6 percent.
Then as now, almost no business on the planet has been so dominated by one company. And he believed he could beat Google at its own game.īattling against Google in web search sounds like a suicide mission - like trying to lower the ocean with a soup spoon. He was 29 and had arrived in Greater Philadelphia with the kind of quiet swagger that a master’s degree from MIT and selling your previous company for $10 million can bring. Web users’ privacy wasn’t yet the big idea when Weinberg launched his home-brewed search engine, DuckDuckGo, amid the modest Philly tech scene of 2008. You’re gonna get more intellectual answers from me.” “I’m sorry I studied technology and public policy. “It’s just the right policy move for our society to have privacy,” he says. He speaks softly and processes his thoughts for multiple nanoseconds before answering a question. He doesn’t present like a guy who might soon be your friendly neighborhood billionaire. Weinberg, 41, looks a little like vintage Elvis Costello has joined your fantasy baseball league.
“Search should be one of the most private spaces on the internet,” he says, “because people are typing in their most sensitive problems and issues.” “We had a time of the week where there were ‘office hours.’” It was an experience that stuck with him, even if the seed took years to sprout. With this newfound power, he created a way for his father, an infectious-disease doctor, to answer people’s questions about HIV and AIDS. In 1991, Weinberg, while in the sixth grade, began exploring online bulletin-board systems and figured out how to set up his own.
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