DuckDuckGo is an American software company founded by Gabriel Weinberg in 2008 that focuses on Internet privacy. Its flagship product is a search engine named DuckDuckGo. Its later products include browser extensions and a custom DuckDuckGo web browser. Headquartered in Paoli, Pennsylvania, DuckDuckGo is a privately held company with about 335 employees. The company's name alludes to the children's game duck, duck, goose.
History Early years
Weinberg got the idea to improve the search experience in a 2007 stained glass class. He tried some search startups that failed before launching DuckDuckGo in 2008.
Weinberg is an entrepreneur who previously launched Names Database, a now defunct social network. Self-funded by Weinberg until October 2011, DuckDuckGo's series A round was led by Union Square Ventures. DuckDuckGo is built primarily upon search APIs from various vendors. As a result, TechCrunch called the service a "hybrid" search engine.
In 2010, DuckDuckGo began using privacy to differentiate itself from its competitors. Linux Mint and the Midori web browser had switched to DuckDuckGo as their default search engine by 2011.
The company registered the domain name ddg.gg on February 22, 2011, and acquired duck.com in December 2018, which are used as shortened URL aliases that redirect to duckduckgo.com, while the latter is also used as the domain for their email protection service.
Growth in the 2010s
Weinberg reported that it had earned $115,000 in revenue in 2011 and had three employees, plus a small number of contractors. In a November 2012, profile, The Washington Post concluded:Weinberg's non-ambitious goals make him a particularly odd and dangerous competitor online. He can do almost everything that Google or Bing can't because it could damage their business models, and if users figure out that they like the DuckDuckGo way better, Weinberg could damage the big boys without even really trying. It's asymmetrical digital warfare, and his backers at Union Square Ventures say Google is vulnerable. The Edward Snowden leaks in 2013 resulted in a lot more awareness about surveillance and growth in users of DuckDuckGo. Growth in privacy concerns also boosted users in 2018 after the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
At its keynote speech at WWDC 2014 on June 2, 2014, Apple announced that DuckDuckGo would be included as a search option in both iOS 8 and OS X Yosemite in its Safari browser. On March 10, the Pale Moon web browser, starting with version 24.4.0, included DuckDuckGo as its default search engine, as well as listed it on the browser's homepage. On May 21, 2014, DuckDuckGo officially released the redesigned version that focused on smarter answers and a more refined look. The new version added many new features, such as images, local search, auto-suggest, weather, and recipes.
On November 10, 2014, Mozilla added DuckDuckGo as a search option to Firefox 33.1. On May 30, 2016, The Tor Project, Inc made DuckDuckGo the default search engine for Tor Browser 6.0.
In July 2016, DuckDuckGo officially announced the extension of its partnership with Yahoo! that brought new features to all users of the search engine, including date filtering of results and additional site links. It also had partnerships with Bing, Yandex, and Wikipedia to produce results or to use their features. The company also confirmed that it does not share user information with partner companies, as has always been its policy.
In December 2018, it was reported that Google had transferred ownership of the domain name duck.com to DuckDuckGo after owning the domain for several years when it acquired On2 Technologies (previously known as The Duck Corporation). It is not known what price, if any, DuckDuckGo paid for the domain name. Weinberg said, "We're pleased Google has chosen to transfer ownership of Duck.com to DuckDuckGo. Having Duck.com will make it easier for people to use DuckDuckGo."
In 2018 and 2019, DuckDuckGo held ultimately unsuccessful talks with Apple about becoming the default search option on Safari's private browsing mode, though it had successfully integrated other privacy features into Safari. On January 15, 2019, DuckDuckGo announced that all map and address-related searches would be powered by Apple Maps, both on desktop and mobile devices.
In March 2019, Google added DuckDuckGo to the default search engine list in Chrome.
The company has offered browser extensions for popular web browsers (including Google Chrome and Firefox). The company also launched its own web browser, called the DuckDuckGo Private Browser, which became available on Desktop in 2022. Both of these products offer some protections against web tracking and other privacy intrusions for all web browsing (not limited to DuckDuckGo searches). Before August 2022, DuckDuckGo Private Browser did not block Microsoft tracking scripts.
2020s
In July 2021, DuckDuckGo introduced its email forwarding feature, Email Protection, which lets users claim an "@duck.com" email address generated by the service. That inbox will receive emails, strip them of data trackers, and forward them to the user's private email address. The feature launched in beta for mobile users of DuckDuckGo Private Browser and released to all customers in August 2022.
Also in April 2022, DuckDuckGo said that they would protect users from being tracked by Google's Accelerated Mobile Pages framework, stating: "When you load or share a Google AMP page anywhere from DuckDuckGo apps (iOS/Android/MacOS) or extensions (Firefox/Chrome), the original publisher's webpage will be used in place of the Google AMP version".
In September 2022, Debian package maintainers switched the default search engine in Chromium to DuckDuckGo for privacy reasons.
In April 2024, DuckDuckGo introduced its own paid subscription, the DuckDuckGo Subscription (formerly Privacy Pro) with Pro and Plus tiers. It includes a VPN, access to more advanced AI models, personal information removal, and identity theft restoration. The subscription launched to users of the DuckDuckGo browser in the United States.
Starting in 2025, DuckDuckGo rolled out a series of Easter eggs featuring variants of the DuckDuckGo logo with Dax (DuckDuckGo's mascot) dressed as characters from popular culture when users search for the respective characters. There are over 800 discovered pop culture logos as of July 2026. Weinberg claimed that designing these images "involve[s] AI, but it is still a fairly manual process, and [DuckDuckGo's] design team (and others) have been involved in it."
By August 2025, Bing had planned to cut off access to its search APIs in a push to sell more AI-related APIs, though DuckDuckGo believed that larger companies like it with long-term deals would not be affected. Bing had dramatically raised rates for its search API in 2022 after ChatGPT debuted.
In 2026, DuckDuckGo introduced "Collaborations", partnerships with companies such as Atoms, Yubico, and Cotton Bureau to create limited-edition "dark mode"-themed merchandise.
Features Privacy DuckDuckGo does not store IP addresses or user information that are used for micro-targeting or sold to advertisers on other search engines.
Search results DuckDuckGo's results have used a compilation of "over 400" sources according to itself, including Bing, Yahoo! Search BOSS, Wolfram Alpha, Yandex, and its own web crawler (the DuckDuckBot). It also uses data from crowdsourced sites such as Wikipedia, to populate knowledge panel boxes to the right of the search results. During a Bing API outage in 2024, DuckDuckGo stopped showing results, indicating that Bing provided a substantial portion of DuckDuckGo's results.
DuckDuckGo offers HTML and lite versions of its search for browsers without JavaScript capabilities.
DuckDuckGo has refined the quality of its search engine results by deleting search results for companies they believe are content mills, such as eHow, which publishes 4,000 articles per day produced by paid freelance writers, which Weinberg states to be "low-quality content designed specifically to rank highly in Google's search index". DuckDuckGo also filters pages with substantial advertising. DuckDuckGo uses assessments by other organizations to down rank websites deemed to have low journalistic standards.
Instant Answers
In addition to the indexed search results, DuckDuckGo displays relevant results, called instant answers, at the top of the search page. These Instant Answers are collected from third-party APIs or static data sources such as text files. The Instant Answers are called zeroclickinfo because the intention behind these is to provide what users are searching for on the search result page itself, so that they do not have to click any results to find what they are looking for. Instant answers are created by and maintained by a community of open source contributors. This community came to be known as DuckDuckHack, which was launched in 2012 as a way for users to code and crowdsource their own plugins. As of August 31, 2017, DuckDuckHack was placed in "maintenance mode"; as such, only pull requests for bug fixes will be approved.
In March 2023, DuckDuckGo added Search Assist (formerly known as DuckAssist) to Instant Answers. Using large language models from OpenAI and Anthropic, Search Assist generates answers to users' questions by sourcing reputable online encyclopedias (like Wikipedia or Encyclopedia Britannica) using its own web crawler, the DuckAssistBot, separate from DuckDuckGo's main web crawler, the DuckDuckBot. Users can choose how often they want it to appear: Never, On-demand (only when Assist is clicked), Sometimes (when highly relevant), or Often (on a wide range of searches). Search Assist results also contain a "More" button, which allows users to have the AI generate a longer answer, and a button which allows users to ask a follow-up question using DuckDuckGo's AI chatbot, Duck.ai.
Tor access
In August 2010, DuckDuckGo introduced anonymous searching, including an exit enclave, for its search engine traffic using Tor network and enabling access through a "Tor hidden service" (onion service). (deprecated) was the DuckDuckGo v2 onion service on Tor. This allows anonymity by routing traffic through a series of encrypted relays. Weinberg said, "I believe this fits right in line with our privacy policy. Using Tor and DDG, you can now be end-to-end anonymous with your searches. And if you use our encrypted homepage, you can be end-to-end encrypted as well."
In July 2021, DuckDuckGo introduced a new v3 onion service, with a new link: .
Bangs
DuckDuckGo includes "!Bang" keywords, which let users search specific third-party websites using the site's own search engine, if applicable. As of May 2026, 13,566 "bangs" for a diverse range of internet sites are available. In December 2018, around 2,000 "bangs" were deleted. Some were deleted because they were broken, while others, such as searches for pirated content sites, were deleted for liability reasons.
Duck.ai