DuckDuckGo calls itself “the research engine that doesn't watch you”. After the revelations in the US National Security Agency files, this seems tempting. Named after the American playground game “duck duck goose”, the site is not just betting on the support of paranoid people about GCHQ, the British intelligence body, and the NSA, its US counterpart. Its founder, Gabriel Weinberg, claims that privacy makes web search better, not worse. As the site does not store your previous searches, it cannot display personalized results. And this frees users from the “filter bubble” – the fear that as search results are increasingly personalized, they are less likely to receive information that challenges their preexisting ideas. It also means that DuckDuckGo is obliged to keep its focus purely on the search. With no stores or data to use, he can't become an advertising giant, has no motivation to try to build a social network, and nothing gains by tracking his emails to create a personal profile. Having answered a billion searches in 2013 alone, DuckDuckGo is on the rise. We interviewed Weinberg about the trajectory of his website.
Why did you create DuckDuckGo in 2008?
DuckDuckGo didn't come from any real motivation to found a search engine. I had left my last company in 2006 [The Names Database, a social network that Weinberg sold for $10 million] and was focused on various personal projects. One of them was fighting spam in search results. There were a lot of sites that were obviously Google spam at the time, but they seemed pretty easy to spot. Another was data obtained from a large number of people [crowdsourcing]. I found myself going to Wikipedia and IMDB a lot, sites that used group data, where you only get answers. The third leg was that I joined a stained glass course, where they delivered a list of links that were the best places to look for information about stained glass making. They didn't match the results of a Google search. So I started a third project about getting links out of people's heads to find out where the best things were. DuckDuckGo is located in the small town of Paoli, Pennsylvania. How much do you think the location puts it outside the general Silicon Valley milieu? We don't feel connected to this medium. Actually, I'm not from here. My wife and I decided to move here together because we thought it would be a good place to raise children and for other deep-seated reasons that don't make sense to people outside the United States. I think anyone in a similar position in Silicon Valley would have gotten a lot more money, much sooner. But that was not our focus. And also just see that we have 75% of remote workers. That's a very non-Silicon Valley thing. Usually you hire the best possible engineers from the big schools and bring them all to the same place so you can put them in the company. After so many years, it seems like people are finally talking about privacy… Yes, and I think that's fair. I don't think it's a fad. One of the big things people have noticed in the last year is the ads that accompany them across the internet, and this is perhaps the most visible idea of this new tracking mindset that most businesses are embracing. These trends are not going away. More internet tracking, more surveillance, so I think when people find out they're going to want to opt out of it, by a certain percentage.
When you started out, your only goal was to build a better search engine. When did you decide that privacy was crucial to her?
Instant responses and spam filtering were really the initial focus and still are in terms of product differentiation. But very quickly after that – I would have done it from the start if I had really thought about it, but I hadn't – was privacy. The data you share with your search engine is the most personal data. Because you don't protect yourself with your search engine. You don't think about it in that context. You think “Oh, I have a financial problem… just type!”, and therefore search history is really personal. It's also been increasingly used for marketing, it's available for subpoenas, and as we've known from last year, it's also available for surveillance, by other covert means. Most of the money a search engine makes comes from showing an ad or something commercial, like a car or shoes, when users search for them, and not tracking doesn't impact that business model.
Why not anonymize the data you collect instead of offering surveys completely incognito?
Reality shows that every time someone tried to anonymize data it was a failure. As long as you can tie in searches and keep any trace of the information, any personal information that might link things back to you, then I guess it's not really private. Are you against tracking on a personal level, or is it just business? No, I have a philosophical opposition. I think of it more as a privacy policy than a general one. I think they should be configured to have the least collection needed, as opposed to the largest possible collection. Another way of looking at this is that I think they should have an exchange, “you are giving away this particular piece of personal information and you are receiving this benefit”, as opposed to the current situation, which is “we will collect whatever we can and not tell you what the benefits are”, just say in general “sure, you will benefit from this”. I think this is the main difference. And some companies are already starting to move in that direction, but very slowly.
Is it possible to make a good search engine without collecting data at Google levels?
I believe you can change to us today and you will be fine. And people are changing. And you can have a better experience! But also, if you look at your Google searches and what's coming up, it's really minimal volume of your search history that they use to modify the results. They're not really using that data today to improve search results in any significant way – as far as we can see. They are using it for other things. They are using them to track you on the ad network.
Does that mean you've backed off a bit in your fight against personalized surveys?
We don't back down! I think, to redefine my case, I don't think the personal data, this personalization, was very helpful. The case that everyone mentions is when, for example, you type “weather”, or you type “pizza”, you want local time or a local pizzeria. So we can do this in our instant reply box – using your location on the fly, not storing it – and not change the actual results of the links. So I think most of what people call personalization is actually location, and we can do that without tracking people. You said earlier that tracking could be used to charge people more if their profiles reveal that they have a lot of money.
Is it something you think is actually going to happen, or is it an exaggerated scenario?
It's real and it's already happening – and it will be magnified. My general view is that if there is information that can lead companies to increase their profits, they will, unless there is a regulation to the contrary. So I definitely think it's there, but people just don't know it's there.
Read more at Guardian.co.uk