DuckDuckGo Raises $10 Million Amid Big Tech Privacy Fears

[tangor]

DuckDuckGo, a pro-privacy search engine alternative, raised $10 million last week from Canada’s Omers’ venture capital fund amid growing privacy concerns from Google.

[breitbart.com...]
Part of the interest in DDG seems to be:

Douglas Schmidt, a research from Vanderbilt University, alleges to have discovered Google still has access to data of Google Chrome users browsing in private “Incognito” mode.

DuckDuckGo is beginning to gain traction. An alternative to g and b would be a fun thing to have.

[Leosghost]

An alternative to g and b would be a fun thing to have.

There is more than one alternative to g and b ..that does not track you already..
qwant
[lite.qwant.com...]

[keyplyr]

As soon as DuckDuckGo stops suplementing its SERP with Bing results, I'll start calling it a search engine.

[tangor]

Different strokes for DIFFERENT folks. :)

[keyplyr]

Today I saw the duck crawl approx 700 pages.Came from AWS using verified duck range.

It triggered one of my conditions and was blocked for requesting files too fast. It kept going getting 403s. Dumb duck.

[lucy24]

Dumb duck.

Also watch out for its faviconbot--which should be encouraged because it makes your site more attractive in SERP--but which requires customized hole-poking due to a string of inexplicable behaviors.

I like DDG visitors. I don't see a lot of them, but they tend to stick around.

[keyplyr]

Yup, do that

[justpassing]

For some reasons, i never see the DDG bot. I pay great attention not to block it, but there is no trace, while Google, Bing even Yahoo's slurp (!) are crawling tens of thousands of pages of my sites per day.

Same, for Qwant, I see, may be, one or two hits per month.

[dstiles]

keyplr - what is the verified duckduck IP range, please?

[keyplyr]

Hi dstiles - you can either wait for me to get back to my desk late Thursday where I have my notes, or use the site search to find the couple of threads in the UA forum where we documented the 2 duck bots and their ranges.

[NickMNS]

As soon as DuckDuckGo stops suplementing its SERP with Bing results, I'll start calling it a search engine.

I believe that DDG has stop using Bing results. But don't start calling it a search engine yet, now it uses Yandex results.

Full disclosure, I'm not sure if it has fully ended its relationship with Bing. ...checking...

I no longer find any reference to Bing or Yandex. At this point it is very unlcear.

But I did find this pro-tip from DDG (It is so good I felt it warranted its own thread) [webmasterworld.com...]

[NickMNS]

Update. I went back and checked a link I had posted previously regarding the Yandex reference and the page that the link points to no longer has any mention of Yandex or Bing.

[lucy24]

what is the verified duckduck IP range

Have they got their own, now? I see the faviconbot from two specific AWS addresses, 54.208.102.abc and 107.21.1.abc (a single /32 each, in seemingly random alternation).

:: avidly awaiting the independent crawling bot, which I haven’t met yet ::

[keyplyr]

The DDG crawl ranges I currently have as verified* is:

UA: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; DuckDuckBot-Https/1.1; https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckbot)
Protocol: HTTP/1.1
Robots.txt: Yes
Host: AWS
50.16.0.0 - 50.19.255.255
50.16.0.0/14

However, AWS now being cloud distributed serving often will move instances to alternative nodes, so the IP range may vary within the AWS ranges in general.

Also: [webmasterworld.com...]

*verified when I emailed AWS and asked

[keyplyr]

I'm seeing another strong crawl today: >2k files

[dstiles]

Thanks, keyplr. I'll likely add duckduckbot to all amazon "whitelists" to be sure.

[keyplyr]

All AWS is best because it bounces around.