Swoogle Semantic Web Search Engine¬es= Swoogle Semantic Web Search Engine. Search DuckDuckGo. Inside DuckDuckGo, Google's Tiniest, Fiercest Competitor. When Gabriel Weinberg launched a search engine in 2008, plenty of people thought he was insane. How could DuckDuckGo, a tiny, Philadelphia-based startup, go up against Google? One way, he wagered, was by respecting user privacy. Six years later, we're living in the post-Snowden era, and the idea doesn't seem so crazy. In fact, DuckDuckGo is exploding. Looking at a chart of DuckDuckGo's daily search queries, the milestones are obvious. "Every year, we've grown 200-500%," Weinberg says. Surprisingly, the sudden success didn't send the site crashing down. Three Ideas In One: Where DuckDuckGo Came From Weinberg didn't originally set out to build a search engine.
"I started all of these projects independently and none of them really took off," Weinberg says. The result was DuckDuckGo, a search engine offering direct answers to people's queries, rather than merely delivering a list of links. Related: Can We All Just Admit Google Is An Evil Empire? Weinberg and his small team seem undeterred.