No, DuckDuckGo is not a children's game (that's duck duck goose). It's an Internet search engine.
As a recent Washington Post article on the company points out, it has two major differences from Google - they don't track their users and they don't filter search results based on tracking their users.
Not tracking their users is, of course, of interest to those concerned about online privacy. We think this provides an interesting advantage for DuckDuckGo.
As consumers become more aware of just how much online tracking is going on - and how this data is being used to compile detailed individual profiles - it's likely there will be push back. A privacy oriented search engine could easily benefit from being the leader in this niche.
The second difference - they don't filter search results based on usage data - is why we've been using DuckDuckGo for the past few months.
A big part of our job is trying to identify what we don't know about a research topic that we should. Generally speaking, this information comes from sources we aren't aware of. This means our search history is not only not a good indicator of where this information might be, it actually reduces the probability we'll find what we need.
Because DuckDuckGo's results are unfiltered, we often find new sources related to the topic we're looking at. This is good.
DuckDuckGo has some other interesting advantages relative to Google. An article on the company from Search Engine Land, for example, argues DuckDuckGo provides better search result presentation than Google.
Having said all that, Google is still our primary search engine and we have no plans to fully replace using DuckDuckGo. In most cases, filtered results are really useful. We also prefer some other features of Google - news search is one example.
So while we like DuckDuckGo, we see it as a niche product. But we find it useful - and useful things tend to last.
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