Every so often we hear about a non-Google search engine that may look to take some of the search share away. The latest search engine in question is DuckDuckGo. With the release of Apples IOS8, DuckDuckGo will be the default search engine with Safari.
What is DuckDuckGO?
DuckDuckGo focuses on protecting searchers’ privacy, so you will not get personalized results as you would with Google for example. DuckDuckGo differentiates itself from other search by purposely showing users the identical search results for a given search term. If you check out their about page, you will notice they have their images blurred out, so yes, they are big on privacy.
DuckDuckGo & PPC Advertising
The fact that DuckDuckGo is being added to IOS8 should give it a good boost in traffic and awareness. For PPC advertisers, if you want to have your ad shown on DuckDuckGo, you will need to have a BING advertising account, and make sure you have All search networks (Bing and Yahoo! search and syndicated search partners) selected so your ads will appear on DuckDuckGO. Now, one thing you will need to keep in mind with PPC ads with them is that they only show one ad. So just one ad, the top ad will be shown for the bidding terms. This could potentially up the bidding for some keywords if things for them really start to take off.
It will be interesting to see how the traffic share for DuckDuckGO increases over the next few months, and to see how the actual traffic from Tablets and mobile devices fairs in Analytics/stats.
Gerard Manning is the owner of Manning Search Marketing and has been working in the SEO industry since 2000. Originally started with Enquiro Search Solutions (now known as Mediative). Was previously a Research Assistant on Inside the Mind of the Searcher that was released in 2005.