Introduction
When you are one of the top reputation management companies it is important to stay informed on all tools that can help your client. In recent years, the number one search engine has been Google. In all honesty, we don’t see that going anywhere fast. However, more and more people are making the switch to DuckDuckGo than ever before. In 2010 they only garnered 79,000 searches a day, on average. If we take a look at those numbers today, they have skyrocketed to over 16 billion searches on an average day. This has led us to take a look at DuckDuckGo and see if there might be an outside chance, they take over Google’s market share.
Search Engines
There are plenty of search engines out there, but none are as notorious as Google. Sure, most people have heard of Yahoo!, Ask.com, and Bing, but not many have heard of DuckDuckGo. The reason for this is because they function on word of mouth. They have claimed that other search engines, namely Google, are not really search companies, rather they are marketing companies. In some ways this is true and in others, it is a bit of an overstatement. While it is true that Google does a lot of marketing and even employs the use of paid advertisements, they do a heck of a lot of work to catalog the internet. That is a large task considering the number of websites there are on the internet today (last we checked it was over a billion).
Making Money
So, if they do not use paid advertisement, how do they make money to continue to make the search experience better? They have recently had affiliate marketing. This is where they have advertisements placed on their pages and whenever someone clicks on the advertisement, they get a small amount of money for it. This is different than people directly paying you to have your result come up first. Essentially, they have a number of companies that want a banner ad to appear on their page and this is randomised based on the search the person runs. The difference is, all the data from that interaction stays in house. They provide neither party with any further information about the other. This maintains the privacy of the customer. They have taken many jabs at Google about sharing information from their customers to the businesses. While this does make for a unique browsing experience, it also makes for businesses having the ability to invade the privacy of the client. For example, have you ever been surfing the web and all of the sudden you get an email from one of the sites you visited? You never opted-in to receive an email from them, but there it is? This is because Google shares information with that client about the information your computer sends out.
Conclusion
If you were to poll the top reputation management companies, you would find that many of them still use Google as the gold standard. If you appear or don’t appear on a Google search, this is where the adjustments will be made in the world of SEO. There are very few companies that worry about others.