In 2008, American entrepreneur Gabriel Weinberg created DuckDuckGo to improve the search engine experience. Within a year, it became popular among the Hacker News and Reddit communities.
In order to differentiate it from competitors, Weinberg took a bold step — he stopped tracking users’ data and search history. But how would you sustain a business if you are not tracking anything and charging zero fees for service?
Here, we delve into how DuckDuckGo generates revenue, its business model, and what sets it apart from other search engines.
Short Answer: DuckDuckGo makes money in three different ways —
- By displaying keyword-based ads on search results
- Via a non-tracking affiliate partnership with eBay and other partners
- By licensing the Tracker Radar dataset for commercial use
Table of Contents
What Is DuckDuckGo?
Unlike most other internet search engines, DuckDuckGo focuses on protecting users’ privacy. It doesn’t collect user data like location, past click behavior, or search history.
And since DuckDuckGo has no information about its users, it cannot show personalized results. This means if you search for a product or sensitive political term, you get an unbiased view of the Internet (irrespective of your previous searches and clicks).
It also seems to omit results from content farms. Sometimes, it extracts content from other search engines like Bing and Yahoo to provide more specific results.
The company has developed privacy protection apps, including a Chrome extension and a private browser for Android, iOS, Windows, and Mac. These apps automatically block cookies and email trackers and enforce encryption (HTTPS) to shield your data from advertisers and attackers.
How is it different than Google?
While Google has developed the most advanced search engine technology, most of its revenue (over 80%) comes from advertisements. It has been a market leader in online advertising for more than a decade.
Over the years, Google has developed and acquired a wide range of advertising technology tools that help advertisers reach the audiences they want online. Simply put, Google helps businesses connect with their target customers.
That’s why Google tracks every user’s data and makes a profile for advertisers to follow around the Internet. The more data they collect, the more they know about you. Your data is then kept and shared with advertisers for an indefinite time.
How does DuckDuckGo make money?
DuckDuckGo makes money through keyword advertising, affiliate commissions, and licensing fees for its proprietary hidden tracking tool.
Keyword Advertising
DuckDuckGo generates the majority of its revenue through advertising. However, unlike other search engines, ads on DuckDuckGo are solely based on keywords (the words you type in the search bar).
For instance, if you type ‘health insurance’ and hit enter, it will simply display ads for health insurance. These ads are not based on your browsing history or previous clicks. You get unbiased ads and results based purely on what you’ve searched for.
In simple terms, DuckDuckGo shows you ads based on the on-page content, while Google and other search engines track your previously visited websites to show you targeted ads.
Advertisers bid through the Microsoft Advertising platform to show their ads on the DuckDuckGo results. The winning auctions get the right to post ads on search queries.
In most cases, DuckDuckGo displays two or three ads per search result. These keyword-based ads are placed on the top of the search results and are well-labeled so users can easily distinguish between paid and organic links.
Affiliate Commissions
To reduce its reliance on advertising, DuckDuckGo has explored other ways to generate revenue. So far, one of the most effective has been its affiliate partnership with eBay.
Although this contributes only a small share of revenue, the partnership allows DuckDuckGo to earn affiliate income without sharing user information with eBay. This arrangement is possible because eBay operates its own large affiliate network.
For certain searches, especially product- and service-related, DuckDuckGo displays items listed on eBay and other retail platforms. Some products may include affiliate links, but it does not affect the ranking of regular organic results in any way.
When a user visits eBay through DuckDuckGo and makes a purchase, DuckDuckGo earns a small commission. The commission rate varies by product category, with electronics and computers generally paying more than categories such as baby products and toys.
The purchase must usually be made within 24 to 72 hours of the user clicking the affiliate link. DuckDuckGo can also earn a commission if the user buys a different product after arriving on eBay through its affiliate link.
Tracker Radar
Tech giants like Google and Facebook use hidden trackers to collect users’ search history, location data, and other key data that can be used to infer age, gender, habits, and interests. These trackers are deployed on hundreds of millions of websites and apps. This is why when you search for something on the Internet, you start seeing ads for it everywhere.
To protect users’ privacy, DuckDuckGo has developed its own dataset of trackers called Tracker Radar. It contains common cross-site trackers and includes data about their tracking behavior, such as privacy policy, ownership, cookie behavior, performance data, and rules for certain resources.
Tracker Radar is automatically created, regularly tested, and updated. The data set and its code are publicly available for research purposes. However, for commercial use, DuckDuckGo charges a small licensing fee.
The Business Model
The primary business model of DuckDuckGo is keyword-based advertising. They do not track users’ history or collect or share any personal data. Everything you search on DuckDuckGo remains anonymous.
DuckDuckGo partners with multiple data sources (for example, Apple for maps and Microsoft for ads) to provide a better search experience. This doesn’t mean that your searches are shared with partners.
Technically, DuckDuckGo does not store personal identifiers like IP addresses and device information. When users click on ads, they are redirected to the advertiser’s website through Microsoft Advertising’s platform. This platform uses the user-agent string and IP address to accurately process clicks and charge advertisers.
The company doesn’t believe targeted ads are necessary — keywords are enough to determine relevance.
And this strategy (of not collecting users’ data) works very well for them. DuckDuckGo has been a profitable company since 2014. However, it generates less revenue than it could have by showing targeted ads.
And since it’s a privately owned company, it can easily get away with this stance. They have no external (public) pressure to increase their profits year over year. They can solely focus on technology and user experience.
Growth Story
DuckDuckGo has processed more than 125 billion searches since its inception. In 2022, it handled nearly 36 billion searches.
Surprisingly, the growth has slowed significantly in the past few years. Here’s the breakdown of the company’s growth in average daily searches from January 2016 to January 2022.
- Jan 2016 to Jan 2017 — 30%
- 2017 to 2018 — 61%
- 2018 to 2019 — 62%
- 2019 to 2020 –52%
- 2020 to 2021 — 73%
- 2021 to 2022 — 17%
- 2022 to 2023 — 1%
- 2024 to 2026 — 0.5-1%
The slow growth rate might be the result of the backlash that DuckDuckGo faced in 2022. Around that time, security researchers revealed that DuckDuckGo’s mobile browser wasn’t blocking Bing and LinkedIn trackers on third-party websites due to a ‘search syndication agreement’ with Microsoft.
It’s unclear why DuckDuckGo, which is known for its transparency, didn’t share this agreement with the public.
The company hasn’t been able to gain users’ trust since then. Their average daily search volume peaked in January 2022 and has remained pretty consistent since then. However, this is expected to increase in the near future.
DuckDuckGo accounts for nearly 1.85% of the search market share in North America. According to SimilarWeb, about 50% of DuckDuckGo traffic comes from the United States, followed by the UK (5.25%), Germany (4.85%), and Canada (4.27%).
DuckDuckGo’s Competitors
There are several other private engines that do not track personally identifiable user data like IP addresses, search history, and user agent strings. The most prominent ones are
- Brave Search: Unlike most other private search engines, Brave uses its own built-from-scratch index, offering seamless integration between private search and a privacy browser.
- Swisscows: Released in 2014, Swisscows uses semantic data recognition to deliver quick answers to queries. It uses the Bing index for English queries and its own index for German queries.
- Startpage: It delivers Google search results while protecting your personal data and removing all trackers. You can open search results through a proxy for enhanced security and anonymity.
- Qwant: This EU-based search engine guarantees to protect users’ privacy and provides the same search results to everyone.
Frequently Asked Questions?
Can you trust DuckDuckGo?
Yes! DuckDuckGo is a safe and trustworthy search engine that delivers accurate results. Although it doesn’t collect your data, it can’t stop other websites (listed in the search results) from tracking your activity. Also, it can’t protect you from malicious web pages.
Individual sites and social media platforms can still track you, while intruders can target you with social engineering attacks. It is recommended that you install a modern antivirus software program to keep your devices safe from all types of malware.
How much does DuckDuckGo make a year?
DuckDuckGo doesn’t reveal its revenue or profit (and it doesn’t have to because it’s a privately held company).
However, in an interview with Philadelphia Magazine, Gabriel Weinberg, CEO of DuckDuckGo, shared that the search engine generated about $100 million in revenue in 2020.
What does the future of search engines look like?
DuckDuckGo plans to continue to counter-position itself against tech giants like Google and Meta. Founder and CEO Gabriel Weinberg believes that DuckDuckGo can hold 10% of the global search engine market.
According to the Mordor Intelligence report, the next-generation search engine market size is expected to grow at a CAGR of 14.8% from 2025 to 2030. The market will likely be moderately concentrated, with a few leading players such as Alphabet, Amazon, Baidu, Alibaba, Apple, and Microsoft.
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