Google personalizing results is nothing new, as anyone who follows the industry knows, though I’m not sure how common this knowledge is to the average user. I’m not sure how often the average user thinks about this or even cares, to be honest.

Earlier this year, Google updated its privacy policy to consolidate numerous policies from its various products into one that can cover most of them, and enable the company to use data from service to service so that it can better personalize the user experience. This is, in fact, something that is even still causing drama in Europe. The EU is expected to tell Google it can’t do this on Tuesday, though it’s been doing it for months.

Google has not hidden from any of this, however, and maintains that a personalized experience is a better experience, and many would likely agree.

DuckDuckGo makes the point that Google is still personalizing searches even for signed out users, and says it had 131 who weren’t signed into Google perfrom searches for three different political queries (abortion, gun control and Obama), with a “wide variance” in resulting links, as it’s put in a Talking Points Memo article on the study.

In other DuckDuckGo news, the search engine has reportedly added “zero click” info from Zanran to its search results.

In 2010, Ask exited the search business to focus its efforts on a Q/A service and mobile endeavors. Also in 2010, Blekko launched with the goal of becoming the “#3 search engine” by tackling the growing problem of spam with its slashtag technology approach.

Other than these events, the search player side of the industry has been relatively quiet. There is, however, current talk of Yahoo re-entering the search market and pulling out of its 10-year search deal with Microsoft. This week, the company introduced Yahoo Axis, which could be its first move in this direction.

Still, there is one more player that we have yet to mention – DuckDuckGo. This search engine launched quietly in 2008 and has stayed somewhat low on the radar until recently. It is getting a lot of attention now though for the bold position it is taking on major issues.

When we talked with the search engine’s founder Gabriel Weinberg last year, he told us that DuckDuckGo was focused on building a search alternative to Google. The search engine separates itself from other search engines through its Zero-Click Info feature that provides instant answers to search queries, its user experience that is free of both spam and clutter, and its privacy protections for users.

Over the past year, DuckDuckGo has ramped up its efforts in each of these areas, and as a result, users are noticing. In a recent conversation with Weinberg, he tells us that DuckDuckGo receives just under 50 million search queries a month, which translates into about 1.5 million each day. In other words, the search engine has more than doubled its traffic.

“We’ve grown gradually since the beginning, but we had a major uptick at the beginning of the year when we launched a visual redesign,” said Weinberg.

He explained that DuckDuckGo made around 100 changes that it rolled out in that redesign. More recently, the search engine announced an effort that encourages developers to add instant answer plugins to DuckDuckGo. The initiative is called DuckDuckHack and is geared toward making the search experience faster and more relevant.

Local, mobile, and social are also just as important to DuckDuckGo as they are to other search engines. Instead of viewing them as individual products, however, it uses an “umbrella approach” for them. In other words, all these areas are incorporated into finding the best search results.

“Instead of tailoring results to you personally,” says Weinberg, “we, instead, return results that are generally known to be good.”

Ultimately, DuckDuckGo is trying to improve in all the areas that Google seems to be lacking in. For instance, Google has had many struggles regarding content farms and spam in the past couple of years. Although it has attempted to address these issues with the ongoing Panda updates, some people, including Weinberg, believe the problems still exist.

“A lot of it seems opaque to me,” said Weinberg. “I’m sure there’s a ton of changes, but I still see a lot of the same kind of, what I consider, content farms on Google.”

The privacy issues against Google continue to build as well. The search giant has received scrutiny from both the U.S. and Europe, and after releasing its new privacy policy earlier this year, it has gotten even more criticism.

For DuckDuckGo, this turn of events creates an opportunity. As users become more dissatisfied with Google, Weinberg is hoping that they’ll look to his search engine as an alternative.

“We’re making the case that there are certainly some users who would prefer to be tracked a lot less,” he said. “I really think there is a percentage who prefer alternative experiences.”

The irony in all this is that DuckDuckGo makes money the same way that Google does – through advertising based on search queries. But, “you don’t have to track users to do that,” Weinberg says.

“The problem is that they want to serve better ads across their sites where you don’t have that search query to serve an ad against,” he further explained.

While it is possible that DuckDuckGo could begin to pull away some of Google’s search market share, Weinberg tell us that DuckDuckGo has no desire to become a big corporation. Web search is the company’s #1 priority at this point, and he intends to keep it that way.

“Our goal really is just to build a nice alternative search engine that… a decent percentage of people would prefer as their search engine of choice,” he said.

Bing director Stefan Weitz spoke to Fast Company yesterday about the change. He says that yesterday’s change was in response to their need to “reinvent search.” Weitz says that Google’s method of “indexing” and “ranking” pages is no longer good enough. Their new method is focused on finding the answers in the search results themselves.

This new method of search is like bringing instant answers to the entire Web. Weitz says that their goal is to “model every object on the planet.” He further clarifies by saying that Bing no longer indexes text, but rather associates “data that exists on the Web in all forms with the physical object that spawned it in the fist place.” The hope is that they can create use this data to create apps that provide instant answers so that users won’t have to click through to a Web page to the find the information they’re looking for.

This method of search is way more ambitious than the current instant answer solutions on the Internet. Google’s instant answers currently extends to things like weather and sports. The only search engine that could be considered comparable is the open source search engine DuckDuckGo. Its new service, DuckDuckHack, allows users to build their own plugins that provide instant answers in the search results for things like Twitter handles and song lyrics.

Of course, as Fast Company points out, this change has the potential to shake the SEO industry to its very core. Google is issuing update after update to its algorithm and Webmasters are doing what they can to keep up. What happens when Google, Bing and the rest provide the answers you need right from the search results. People aren’t going to click through to the Web page anymore so normal search concepts just aren’t going to be as important anymore.

Bing’s redesign is just the first step towards this new method of search. It will still be a while before they start to offer an instant answer service that will make a lot of the normal tropes of search obsolete. Who knows? Maybe Google or the rumored Facebook search engine could come out first and beat Bing to the punch.

Do you think abandoning conventional search tactics is good for users and Webmasters? How will Webmasters adapt to the new rules of search? Will the new rules of search even catch on? Let us know in the comments.

Now I’m sure you can gather what DuckDuckHack means. Gabriel Weinberg, founder of the open source search engine, wants people to create what he calls “instant answer plugins” for DuckDuckGo. The idea is that the search results would benefit from these add-ons in the form of “instant answers.” It’s not the same as Google Instant, it’s actually a bit more ambitious.

Weinberg says that there are some searches that just frustrate people. You just keep searching and searching for that one topic and nothing relevant comes up. So what if somebody created a plug-in for that topic that made sure the most relevant topics were brought to the front? It is the very spirit of open source – if it’s not a feature, make it a feature.

It’s an ambitious project and one that has a lot of potential. I want to say that it’s kind of like Google’s Search Plus Your World in terms of delivering the most relevant results. The only difference is that DuckDuckGo’s approach puts the search results in the hands of the users instead of what Google’s algorithms think you want.

There are four plugins compatible with DuckDuckGo at the moment. Goodies is for finding calculations and cheat sheets, Spice is for finding external API calls, Fathead is for finding keyword databases and Longtail is for finding full-text data. They are all in alpha, but Weinberg said that they are being “rapidly cleaned up.”

Here are some of our favorite plugins that are currently available for DuckDuckGo based on the four plug-ins. The first is the Twitter plugin that pulls up a user’s Twitter handle complete with bio and latest Tweet.

The other great plugin is the xkcd add-on that allows you to search for xkcd plus the number of the comic to bring up that specific comic as the first search result.

If you find yourself compelled to start making awesome plugins for a search engine that really should be used more often, you can get started with the initial documentation. It’s all open source so go nuts. Be daring and experiment. Oh, also get back to me once somebody creates a plugin that finds the perfect recipe each time for whatever dish the user is searching for. I’ve been searching for the perfect potato salad recipe for years and I’ve found it to be one elusive dish.

As you can see, this is all pretty cool. While other search engines have been using instant answers for a while now to return relevant searches for sports and other major events, there has been nothing this targeted yet. Putting the power of search in the hands of the user is a powerful thing indeed.

Granted, that’s only .001% of the daily search queries that go through Google but still, that’s an enormous boost in traffic going through DuckDuckGo. This is likely correlative of the fact that general conversation about privacy picked up after Google announced it was changing its privacy policy on January 24, but prior to that day DuckDuckGo had been hovering between the 400K-600K neighborhood of direct searches per day. The afternoon after Google announced the policy change, a new record high of 848,468 searches were made on DuckDuckGo; skipping a little more than a month ahead on February 27th, that number had ballooned to 1,320,022 searches.

Since then, DuckDuckGo told the carpenters to take the roof off the building because their traffic has been skyrocketing: yesterday, March 28, the site had 1,518,581 direct queries.

In addition to internet users becoming more mindful of their own online privacy, the boom also corresponds with some significant funding the website received back in October 2011.

As the company continues to forage into the mainstream and more support coalesces around sites promoting user privacy, the company looks to be making some improvements to the site’s quality of service. In a post on Hacker News earlier today, DuckDuckGo founder Gabriel Weinberg posted the following under the thread “DuckDuckGo is blowing up“:

Thank you all! (I’m the founder.)

In response to a lot of the comments here, please know that two major things we’re working on are better programming queries (https://duckduckgo.com/tech.html — one of my new favorites https://duckduckgo.com/?q=alternative+to+picasa) and speed.

For speed, just this week we upgraded our whole caching system, which should significantly speed up a lot of queries. I’d be interested to know if anyone has noticed any difference over the past day or so. This change should equalize a lot of the location differences, which is the main issue. In some parts of the world we were way slower.

The post goes on to mention that DuckDuckGo is becoming involved in open sourcing as well as bringing more hands on deck for help with system administration.

To infinity and beyond, DuckDuckGo. Infinity and beyond.

[Via 9to5Google.]

Now, the “third search engine” is testing ads, according to a report from MediaPost. These ads, however, are coming from Google and Bing – AdSense and Microsoft’s counterpart. Laurie Sullivan reports:

Visitors who visit the search engine, however, probably will not see a search ad based on their query. Few are linked to slashtags, which helps to curate content, according to Rich Skrenta, Blekko founder and CEO.

“We’re still ironing out the kinks,” Skrenta said. The company will measure success based on RPMs — page revenue per 1000 ad units.

Meanwhile, Blekko’s peer (in terms of alternative search engines), DuckDuckGo, announced that it saw over a million searches in one day for the first time. (hat tip: SearchEngineLand)

Both alternative search engines announced new funding last fall. Blekko announced a $30 million investment from a mix of investors in September. In October, DuckDuckGo announced its first round of funding (the amount was not disclosed).

It adds to the noticeable undercurrent of fear that, fueled largely by protests over sweeping Internet legislation, has been permeating. Perhaps fear is the wrong word. Maybe unease is better, but it’s there and it’s undeniable. Internet privacy is just one of the trending topics adding to it. With that in mind, the efforts of DuckDuckGo are admirable.

The search engine with the funny name — hey, you have to stand out — offers a non-tracking service, one that doesn’t send the keyword you searches as the referral term to the site being visited from DDG’s search results. If privacy in relation to search is important to you, DuckDuckGo is certainly not shy about offering you an alternative. Over at the nifty TLD’d donttrack.us site, they make their case with a basic-but-informative explanation of what Google does when you search and what they offer, complete with screenshots of the process in action.

The page is presented infographic-style, and it’s quite effective. An example:

And:

It’s a little bit of a scroll monster, but because the information is important, not to mention, presented in an effective, humorous manner, the scrolling is easy to overlook. It should be noted that privacy in relation to search is not the only service DuckDuckGo offers. Their goodies page is filled with a number of useful resources, like facts, conversions, calculations and dates. Bonus, you can use them all right there, on-page. Further navigation is not necessary.

There’s also some geek credibility going on, something their zero-click info sources lists of Wikia outlets suggests:

• Wookieepedia – Darth Plagueis
• Halopedia – covenant loyalists
• RuneScape Wiki – zamorak robes
• Memory Alpha – Balok’s cube
• eWrestling Wiki – tromboner man
• Memory Beta – RIS Brunia
• The Psychology Wiki – tachistoscopes
• Star Wars Fanon Wiki – gulper serpent
• Muppet Wiki – pink monster
• Annex – sembia
• Digimon Wiki – Alphamon
• Dragon Ball Wiki – Pui Pui nice shot
• Dofus Wiki – Bherb’s Gully
• Fallout Wiki – Diesoon
• Final Fantasy Wiki – gippal
• Indiana Jones wiki – Maggie Stanforth
• The Pokemon Encyclopedia – treecko

As the world of the Internet is undergoing some strain as tech companies, governments and copyright protectors battle for “control,” one of the issues embroiled in the unease is privacy. If Google’s search behavior is just too imposing for your comfort, DuckDuckGo offers a viable, useful alternative.

It should be noted, DDG’s “We Don’t Track” service, as is the alteration to the duck in the logo, is in support of Data Privacy Day, which starts today, but continues on “in the surrounding weeks.” The goal of this movement is simple:

On January 28 and in the surrounding weeks, the United States, Canada and many other countries celebrate Data Privacy Day. Privacy is our shared responsibility. Participate in Data Privacy Day by educating students or parents, training employees, hosting an event or sponsoring DPD.

The official sponsors of the event are Intel and eBay, which is quite telling.

The home page doesn’t look much different. It still looks like the image you see above.

The search results pages are a bit different. The header has gone from green to red, for example. There is a set of search suggestions on the right-hand side.

You can actually change the color to anything you want from the settings. That goes for not only the header, but: highlight, URLs, background, text, links, visited links and border.

In case you’re wondering why you should use DuckDuckGo instead of Google (or Bing), founder Gabriel Weinberg makes his case in this interview he did with WebProNews from last year:

In October, DuckDuckGo announced its first round of funding, led by Union Square Ventues. At the time, Brad Burnham wrote on the Union Square Ventures blog, ” We invested in DuckDuckGo because we became convinced that it was not only possible to change the basis of competition in search, it was time to do it.” He seemed to suggest that the investors see something in DuckDuckGo that reminds them of a young Google.

Hopefully the redesign is up to snuff for users, because the company has been taking feedback for it as it’s been going. The company said in a community post:

“The new visual design is live on the main site! Thank you all for the feedback and suggestions leading up to it.”

Do you use DuckDuckGo? What are your thoughts about the new design?

(Hat tip: Matt McGee)

For more daily video round-ups, go here.

How bad would he have felt if they actually had made the 4,000 lattes?

A house that sings Marilyn Manson’s ‘This is Halloween’… need I say more?

DuckDuckGo is currently accepting their first round of funding. Here is an interview we did with the founder earlier this year.

“My Blackberry is not working!” A timely skit from some British comedy show.

Utilizing WebGL technology, Google Maps GL is a pretty neat experimental project which gives users a richer maps experience.

Google Sex Toy. That is all.

The Googlher from Randy Sarafan on Vimeo.

Have you ever thrown your camera into the air? Eh, probably not… but check out this camera, it’s made for throwing.

Could shopping be the next big phenomenon on Facebook? This is the question we ask as WebProNews interviews the co-founder of Sneakpeeq.

In a Union Square Ventures blog post, Brad Burnham writes:

When I first got into the venture capital business in the early 90s, it seemed to me that half of the deals I brought to the partnership were dismissed with the line “sure it’s cool but what the heck do they do if Microsoft decides to enter this business.” Today the role of the dominant player is played by Google (and increasingly Facebook). So as an investor, one has to consider how a potential portfolio company can thrive in the shadow of Google. No where is this more true than in Search.

So, as you can imagine, we had a lot of interesting conversations in the process of evaluating our latest investment in Gabriel Weinberg’s alternative search engine,DuckDuckGo. Our confidence in Gabriel and DuckDuckGo is informed by having watched the decline of Microsoft’s hegemony in the 90′s. Two things happened that fundamentally changed the game: a shift in venue and a shift in business model. The venue moved from the desktop to the web and the business model shifted from packaged software to open source. It turned out that the way to compete with Microsoft was to not to compete, at least not directly. The way to compete with Microsoft was to change the basis of competition. We invested in DuckDuckGo because we became convinced that it was not only possible to change the basis of competition in search, it was time to do it.

It seems as though Union Square sees something in DuckDuckGo that reminds them of when Google entered the scene. “The company is young and under staffed so there are definitely holes Gabriel hopes to fill, but his observation that “traditional algorithmic signals are not the only authority on the web,” and his clever use of real authorities to curate search results makes Duck Duck Go an interesting alternative to your everyday brand,” Burnham says.

Here’s an interview we did with Weinberg earlier this year, where he makes the case for DuckDuckGo (vs. Google):

In a post on his own blog, Weinberg says:

So why now? At the end of last year I noticed that the search engine started to really click with a greater percentage of people in a way that it hadn’t before. Don’t get me wrong — we still have a long way to go to reachour vision — but it was obvious that some things were really starting to become compelling, e.g. our Zero-click Info, privacy policy and goodies. 

We’ve been trying to address this issue from a number of angles. We leverage external APIs as heavily as possible. We’ve been slowly open sourcing things and recruiting developers to help us integrate data and goodies. (If this piques your interest, start here!) 

He notes that the company has already begun building its team, and expects to be able to build on that significantly with the new funding.

The amount of the funding is unclear.