DuckDuckGo, yes that is an interesting subject. Namely, it is the primary search engine I use for gathering information for this blog. So, what does Wikipedia have to say about it? For the most part, what it says today is what it said a few years ago. But, the popularity and traffic numbers is the new thing. In this year of 2019, DuckDuckGo has reached 1 billion searches per month. And quite a while ago, it previously took a full year to get to 1 billion searches!
So, what was the secret of DuckDuckGo’s growth success? By all means, it appears that some of the early traditional billboard advertising helped it inch up a little bit. But, what really helped it grow by leaps and bounds was its coverage in mass surveillance scandal news as an alternative to the evils promulgated by companies like Google. That is what really made DuckDuckGo take off. The second thing that really made DuckDuckGo take off was its full web privacy toolkit. Again, this is best understood in context of the mass media mass surveillance scandal news.
Interestingly enough, the inclusion of DuckDuckGo as an option in Safari and Firefox browsers didn’t appear to have as significant of an uptick as the uptick that came in response to mainstream media news. So, the secret of DuckDuckGo’s success? Start out by planning for a known gap in the market. Get a small community around your product. Then, wait for a kicker subject to come into the purview of mainstream media. Then, jump with traditional advertising and marketing within the mainstream media advertising outlets. Then, cash in on the growth to come.
20190405/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuckDuckGo
20190405/https://duckduckgo.com/traffic
DuckDuckGo manually removes websites they believe to be “content farms” such as eHow. Oh, really? That’s interesting. I’ve heard of eHow a long time ago in 2006 for elementary school English research paper writing classes and visited it a few times back, but I’ve never really wondered why I haven’t seen the site since then. Mainly, the only reason why I used the site was because it was “some site other than Wikipedia,” but had the school teachers known this, that eHow was essentially a “content farm” that churns out a large number of low-quality results mainly to rank high in search engine results and cash in on the advertising revenue profits, then perhaps Wikipedia would have been regarded as a more credible source. But, anyways, that’s why we don’t see eHow in search results anymore, not to mention that we’d probably prefer Wikipedia by default over eHow even at the time.
20190405/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_farm
20190405/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EHow
20190405/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Panda
20190405/https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2011/05/more-guidance-on-building-high-quality.html
20190405/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_penalty