Private: some search engines make money by not tracking users

guest · May 16, 2012

Source.

Ars said:

...One of the top privacy search engines has a name reminiscent of a children’s game: DuckDuckGo. The site was founded two years ago but has recently taken off; just last month, it hit an all-time record of 1.5 million searches per day and its daily search traffic has grown by 227 percent in three months. So what does DuckDuckGo do differently, besides putting up cheeky billboards in San Francisco? DuckDuckGo works by using both its own Web crawler and data from other search engines, including Yahoo, Bing, and Blekko—but not Google. The company claims not to log IP addresses or user agents, and “no cookies are used by default." It also uses default encryption modeled after HTTPS Everywhere. “Not really knowing about [what the other guys do], we independently made the decision that we wanted to go down this route of not storing this data,” explained Gabriel Weinberg, the site’s founder, in an interview with Ars this month. “Search engines have a history of getting subpoenas, and Google has been more and more open to the requests that they were responding to," he said. "It seemed inevitable that search engines would get requests from law enforcement—I don’t like that idea of handing over data.” Beyond that, the company started operating a Tor exit enclave not long after it launched, allowing traffic headed for the DuckDuckGo search engine to exit the Tor network. “That makes it easier for people on Tor to hit our search engine and it means that we don’t store stuff and you can ensure that it exits through us. You can be end-to-end anonymous on Tor,” Weinberg added. How does a site that makes a point of not tracking its users make money? Through contextualized search ads that generate “sponsored links.” Not that Google's money machine should start to worry yet; Weinberg says that his for-profit company earned around $115,000 in revenue in 2011—with three employees and a handful of other contractors...

Read more: http://arstechnica.com/business/201...ngines-that-make-money-by-not-tracking-users/
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elapsed · May 17, 2012

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