Duck Duck Go, Inc.

Who owns DuckDuckGo?

Duck Duck Go, Inc., a private company in Paoli, Pennsylvania, owns DuckDuckGo. Founder Gabriel Weinberg controls the company alongside minority venture investors including Union Square Ventures.

Is DuckDuckGo publicly traded?

No. The company is privately held and has never listed. It raised modest venture funding, about 170 million dollars total including secondary sales.

Does DuckDuckGo track you?

No. The search engine does not store search histories, build user profiles, or use behavioral ad targeting. Its ads are contextual, tied to the current search keywords only.

How does DuckDuckGo make money?

Primarily through keyword-based search advertising served without user tracking, plus the Privacy Pro subscription covering VPN, data removal, and identity theft restoration.

What is DuckDuckGo's market share?

About 0.7% of global search referrals as of October 2026, and roughly 2% in the United States, making it the largest independent privacy search engine.

Is DuckDuckGo owned by Google or Microsoft?

No. It is an independent private company. Its search results draw in part on Microsoft's Bing index and its ads run through the Microsoft Advertising network, but Microsoft does not own it.

Gabriel Weinberg launched DuckDuckGo in February 2008 and opened it to the public that September, self-funding the project from the sale of his previous startup, the social network Names Database. He ran the company alone for its first years, writing the code and answering support questions personally from Pennsylvania.

The privacy positioning was present from the start, formalized in the slogan that the engine does not track you, but growth was slow until 2011's funding and 2013's catalyst. Union Square Ventures led a Series A in 2011. Then Edward Snowden's surveillance disclosures in 2013 made DuckDuckGo's pitch concrete for millions of users, and query volumes began a growth curve that has run for over a decade, passing 100 million daily searches in 2021.

The company moved from his home office to Paoli, built a remote-first team across dozens of countries, and expanded beyond search: browser extensions in the 2010s, the full DuckDuckGo browser for mobile in 2018 and desktop later, email protection, the Privacy Pro subscription in 2023, and private AI access through Duck.ai. Funding stayed modest: a 2020 secondary transaction, a 59 million dollar Series C in 2021, and smaller later rounds, roughly 170 million dollars total including secondary sales, a fraction of what consumer internet competitors burned.

As of 2026, the company holds about 0.7% of global search referrals, roughly 2% in the United States, and processes billions of queries annually. Weinberg still runs it as CEO, and the company remains one of the few independent search brands left standing.

DuckDuckGo's ethics posture is its product: not collecting personal data, donating to privacy and digital rights causes, and operating a carbon-conscious distributed workforce. It has donated to organizations supporting open internet and privacy research annually for over a decade.

The company holds no formal B Corp or comparable certification. Its remote-first structure across 30-plus countries is its main operational distinction, and no environmental or labor controversies are on record.

Microsoft tracker exception (2022): Researchers found the DuckDuckGo browser permitted Microsoft trackers on third-party sites due to a syndication contract clause, contradicting its no-tracking image. The company fixed the gap and disclosed the constraint, but the episode was its most-cited reputational event.

Antitrust testimony: Weinberg testified in the US government's antitrust case against Google, arguing default placement rather than product quality drives search share, a position that put the small company inside the decade's biggest tech case without a ruling against it.

No data breaches, fines, or product recalls are on record, a notable record for a company whose whole product is privacy.