Unsurprisingly, the average citizen reacted fairly badly to Edward Snowden’s revelation that their personal data was being given away to nebulous government agencies. As such, there’s been an enormous boom in the ‘anonymity economy’ with sites like Prism Break guiding visitors of the best way to avoid being tracked online.
The major beneficiary from this current panic is the upstart search engine DuckDuckGo, whose main selling point has always been total privacy. After the leak exposing the existence of the NSA’s secret surveillance programme PRISM, the search engine saw a 50 per cent traffic increase in only eight days, with word of mouth has causing it to continually rise.
Source: https://duckduckgo.com/traffic.html
Rather than using the expansive Google index, DuckDuckGo works with data taken by its own site crawl, as well as third party resources like Wikipedia, WolframAlpha, Yandex and Bing. In contrast, Startpage and its sister site Ixquick, which just passed 4 million searches on Monday 3rd July, simply allow users to access the Google index without any form of tracking.
While these engines lack the sorts of personalised results offered by other providers, this is not necessarily a bad thing - a 2012 survey by the Pew Report found 65 per cent of searchers disliked personalised search, with 73 per cent treating it as an invasion of privacy. DuckDuckGo produced a very compelling argument about how this customisation actually causes people to end up avoiding alternative view-points and end up stuck in a ‘filter bubble’ (found here: http://dontbubble.us/).
MEC opinion: As much as they may not like being spied on, people will almost always choose convenience over privacy. While DuckDuckGo has certainly had a great month, it would need to go a lot further to be of any concern to Google, so it’s unlikely to make too much of a dent on the search landscape any time soon.
As a result, SEO specialists won’t be rushing to optimise specifically for DuckDuckGo, but from a business perspective this situation serves a reminder that online privacy is still a huge concern to the general public.