SEO
What Is DuckDuckGo & Who Uses This Alternative Search Engine?
![What Is DuckDuckGo & Who Uses This Alternative Search Engine? What Is DuckDuckGo & Who Uses This Alternative Search Engine?](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/What-Is-DuckDuckGo-Who-Uses-This-Alternative-Search-Engine.png)
For many years, websites have collected user data to either sell to third-party sites or use for their targeted advertising.
The most well-known examples include Facebook and Google.
Serving an ad or showing relevant search results about the shoes you wanted seemed like a relatively harmless use of personal data that worked to (what seemed like) everyone’s benefit.
Then the data scandals started.
From the Microsoft Hotmail scandal to Cambridge Analytica to the Zoom scandal of 2020, online users have felt the sting of leaked data.
These scandals have made users more aware of how their data is being used on the web – and left many wondering how to have more online privacy.
Enter DuckDuckGo.
What Is DuckDuckGo?
DuckDuckGo is a search engine created by Gabriel Weinberg in 2008. This search engine is dedicated to the online privacy of its users.
Their search features include:
- Maps.
- Weather.
- Local business answers.
- News.
- Images.
- Videos.
- Products and shopping.
- Definitions.
- Wikipedia references.
- Currency conversions.
- Flight information.
- Calculator.
- Timer.
- Sport scores.
- Question and answer references.
DuckDuckGo also includes what they call bonus features:
- Shortcut commands that take you directly to other websites from the search engine.
- Language and region localization.
- Customizable themes, including a dark theme.
DuckDuckGo also has apps and extensions for various operating systems and browsers.
So, you can still use Chrome, Safari, or any other favorite browser and avoid being tracked.
DuckDuckGo User Statistics
DuckDuckGo is the second most popular mobile search engine in the U.S.
DuckDuckGo users made over 8 billion search queries in Q1 of 2022.
DuckDuckGo holds 0.68% of the search engine market share worldwide.
However, in the U.S, DuckDuckGo holds 2.51% of the search engine market share.
The DuckDuckGo Chrome extension app has over six million users.
Advertising on DuckDuckGo is 10 times cheaper than Google.
DuckDuckGo has raised $13 million in funds.
DuckDuckGo operates with a staff of 172 people.
How Is DuckDuckGo Different From Other Search Engines?
When you visit a website, that website takes note of your IP address through network routers, so they know where to send the information.
Typically, a website stores your IP address and the data.
However, DuckDuckGo promises to hide your IP address when using its search engine.
When you click on a search result, the link redirects the information request to prevent it from sending your search terms to the site.
Essentially, the sites know that you visited them, but they don’t know from where or with what keywords.
Additionally, to provide a personalized search experience, Google, Yahoo, and Bing track your search history and personal data (even in incognito mode).
This practice helps these search engines deliver targeted ads and personalized search results.
DuckDuckGo takes the opposite approach from other search engines.
DuckDuckGo promises to avoid collecting that data so you can escape what they call the “filter bubble.”
DuckDuckGo’s search results are not customized based on personal preference, search history, or location.
No Stored Search History
Think about all the things you search for online: medical information, financial solutions, location-based queries, etc.
Some of those searches can be pretty personal.
Other major search engines sell that information to advertisers so they can serve you personalized ads.
DuckDuckGo promises never to store your search history, ever.
Every time you use DuckDuckGo’s browser, you can expect a new search result.
So how do they make money?
By still serving you ads, of course.
However, the difference is that DuckDuckGo targets the keywords you search for instead of being based on you.
So, if you search for pens, it’ll show you ads for pens.
However, if you then search for stationery, it’ll show you ads for stationery.
No Third-Party Trackers
Did you know that Google tracks website visitors on 86% of the top 50,000 websites globally?
That’s because many sites use Google Analytics to help track visitors. Additionally, Google runs three of the most extensive non-search ad networks most sites use: Adsense, Admob, and DoubleClick.
So it’s hard to get away from Google. Yahoo and Bing also track your internet usage to build profiles on you.
Facebook is another tech giant that tracks users behind the scenes.
However, their coverage is only 36% of the top websites.
DuckDuckGo’s browser and mobile app promise to block trackers from other search engines, Facebook, and other trackers.
So for those looking to stay anonymous when they venture off the search engines, DuckDuckGo could be your answer.
Unfiltered Results
Have you ever heard of the filter bubble?
The filter bubble occurs when users encounter information that reinforces their own beliefs.
Considering that Google, Bing, and Yahoo are best known for providing personalized search results, you can imagine this happens frequently.
What does this mean for searchers?
If you have political leanings or other ideologies, the major search engines remember that and filter out content they think you’ll skip.
Therefore, you are more likely to be served results you already agree with.
DuckDuckGo, on the other hand, believes that search results should be unbiased.
Therefore, their search results page gives everyone the same results, regardless of their political preference, cultural bias, or other demographics.
What Crawler Does DuckDuckGo Use?
DuckDuckGo uses over 400 sources to provide results, including sources such as:
- Bing.
- Yahoo.
- Apple Maps.
- Wolfram Alpha.
- Yandex.
They also use DuckDuckBot, their web crawler, and other crowd-sourced sites like Wikipedia to generate their equivalent of a snippet.
However, they explicitly confirm that they do not use any sources from Google.
Additionally, as part of their strict privacy policy, they promise never to share any personal information with their partners.
This is reassuring to those who want their internet usage to stay private.
Pros And Cons Of DuckDuckGo
Though Google is still the big man on top, the number of DuckDuckGo’s users is climbing steadily.
They don’t track users, so it’s impossible to get an exact number.
But DuckDuckGo reported that 80 million people used their search engine as of November 2020.
While DuckDuckGo may seem like the perfect solution for those with privacy concerns, there are some pros and cons to this alternative search engine.
Pros of DuckDuckGo:
- Absolute privacy when searching.
- Bangs shortcuts to take you directly to a website.
- Clean interface.
- No targeted ads.
- Unbiased search results.
- One-page search results.
- No social engineering based on your searches.
Cons of DuckDuckGo:
- Not as many search engine perks as Google, Yahoo, or Bing.
- The search algorithm is not as advanced.
- Limited search results.
- No protection from malware or viruses.
- Weak ranking factors.
- Mapping and image results are not as good.
If you value your online privacy and don’t mind taking a few extra minutes to search, then DuckDuckGo is a viable alternative.
However, if you like all the bells and whistles of other major search engines, remember that those luxuries come at a cost.
More resources:
Featured Image: Iconbunny11/Shutterstock
SEO
WordPress Insiders Discuss WordPress Stagnation
![WordPress Insiders Discuss WordPress Stagnation WordPress Insiders Discuss WordPress Stagnation](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/WordPress-Insiders-Discuss-WordPress-Stagnation.jpg)
A recent webinar featuring WordPress executives from Automattic and Elementor, along with developers and Joost de Valk, discussed the stagnation in WordPress growth, exploring the causes and potential solutions.
Stagnation Was The Webinar Topic
The webinar, “Is WordPress’ Market share Declining? And What Should Product Businesses Do About it?” was a frank discussion about what can be done to increase the market share of new users that are choosing a web publishing platform.
Yet something that came up is that there are some areas that WordPress is doing exceptionally well so it’s not all doom and gloom. As will be seen later on, the fact that the WordPress core isn’t progressing in terms of specific technological adoption isn’t necessarily a sign that WordPress is falling behind, it’s actually a feature.
Yet there is a stagnation as mentioned at the 17:07 minute mark:
“…Basically you’re saying it’s not necessarily declining, but it’s not increasing and the energy is lagging. “
The response to the above statement acknowledged that while there are areas of growth like in the education and government sectors, the rest was “up for grabs.”
Joost de Valk spoke directly and unambiguously acknowledged the stagnation at the 18:09 minute mark:
“I agree with Noel. I think it’s stagnant.”
That said, Joost also saw opportunities with ecommerce, with the performance of WooCommerce. WooCommerce, by the way, outperformed WordPress as a whole with a 6.80% year over year growth rate, so there’s a good reason that Joost was optimistic of the ecommerce sector.
A general sense that WordPress was entering a stall however was not in dispute, as shown in remarks at the 31:45 minute mark:
“… the WordPress product market share is not decreasing, but it is stagnating…”
Facing Reality Is Productive
Humans have two ways to deal with a problem:
- Acknowledge the problem and seek solutions
- Pretend it’s not there and proceed as if everything is okay
WordPress is a publishing platform that’s loved around the world and has literally created countless jobs, careers, powered online commerce as well as helped establish new industries in developing applications that extend WordPress.
Many people have a stake in WordPress’ continued survival so any talk about WordPress entering a stall and descent phase like an airplane that reached the maximum altitude is frightening and some people would prefer to shout it down to make it go away.
Acknowledging facts and not brushing them aside is what this webinar achieved as a step toward identifying solutions. Everyone in the discussion has a stake in the continued growth of WordPress and their goal was to put it out there for the community to also get involved.
The live webinar featured:
- Miriam Schwab, Elementor’s Head of WP Relations
- Rich Tabor, Automattic Product Manager
- Joost de Valk, founder of Yoast SEO
- Co-hosts Matt Cromwell and Amber Hinds, both members of the WordPress developer community moderated the discussion.
WordPress Market Share Stagnation
The webinar acknowledged that WordPress market share, the percentage of websites online that use WordPress, was stagnating. Stagnation is a state at which something is neither moving forward nor backwards, it is simply stuck at an in between point. And that’s what was openly acknowledged and the main point of the discussion was understanding the reasons why and what could be done about it.
Statistics gathered by the HTTPArchive and published on Joost de Valk’s blog show that WordPress experienced a year over year growth of 1.85%, having spent the year growing and contracting its market share. For example, over the latest month over month period the market share dropped by -0.28%.
Crowing about the WordPress 1.85% growth rate as evidence that everything is fine is to ignore that a large percentage of new businesses and websites coming online are increasingly going to other platforms, with year over year growth rates of other platforms outpacing the rate of growth of WordPress.
Out of the top 10 Content Management Systems, only six experienced year over year (YoY) growth.
CMS YoY Growth
- Webflow: 25.00%
- Shopify: 15.61%
- Wix: 10.71%
- Squarespace: 9.04%
- Duda: 8.89%
- WordPress: 1.85%
Why Stagnation Is A Problem
An important point made in the webinar is that stagnation can have a negative trickle-down effect on the business ecosystem by reducing growth opportunities and customer acquisition. If fewer of the new businesses coming online are opting in for WordPress are clients that will never come looking for a theme, plugin, development or SEO service.
It was noted at the 4:18 minute mark by Joost de Valk:
“…when you’re investing and when you’re building a product in the WordPress space, the market share or whether WordPress is growing or not has a deep impact on how easy it is to well to get people to, to buy the software that you want to sell them.”
Perception Of Innovation
One of the potential reasons for the struggle to achieve significant growth is the perception of a lack of innovation, pointed out at the 16:51 minute mark that there’s still no integration with popular technologies like Next JS, an open-source web development platform that is optimized for fast rollout of scalable and search-friendly websites.
It was observed at the 16:51 minute mark:
“…and still today we have no integration with next JS or anything like that…”
Someone else agreed but also expressed at the 41:52 minute mark, that the lack of innovation in the WordPress core can also be seen as a deliberate effort to make WordPress extensible so that if users find a gap a developer can step in and make a plugin to make WordPress be whatever users and developers want it to be.
“It’s not trying to be everything for everyone because it’s extensible. So if WordPress has a… let’s say a weakness for a particular segment or could be doing better in some way. Then you can come along and develop a plug in for it and that is one of the beautiful things about WordPress.”
Is Improved Marketing A Solution
One of the things that was identified as an area of improvement is marketing. They didn’t say it would solve all problems. It was simply noted that competitors are actively advertising and promoting but WordPress is by comparison not really proactively there. I think to extend that idea, which wasn’t expressed in the webinar, is to consider that if WordPress isn’t out there putting out a positive marketing message then the only thing consumers might be exposed to is the daily news of another vulnerability.
Someone commented in the 16:21 minute mark:
“I’m missing the excitement of WordPress and I’m not feeling that in the market. …I think a lot of that is around the product marketing and how we repackage WordPress for certain verticals because this one-size-fits-all means that in every single vertical we’re being displaced by campaigns that have paid or, you know, have received a a certain amount of funding and can go after us, right?”
This idea of marketing being a shortcoming of WordPress was raised earlier in the webinar at the 18:27 minute mark where it was acknowledged that growth was in some respects driven by the WordPress ecosystem with associated products like Elementor driving the growth in adoption of WordPress by new businesses.
They said:
“…the only logical conclusion is that the fact that marketing of WordPress itself is has actually always been a pain point, is now starting to actually hurt us.”
Future Of WordPress
This webinar is important because it features the voices of people who are actively involved at every level of WordPress, from development, marketing, accessibility, WordPress security, to plugin development. These are insiders with a deep interest in the continued evolution of WordPress as a viable platform for getting online.
The fact that they’re talking about the stagnation of WordPress should be of concern to everybody and that they are talking about solutions shows that the WordPress community is not in denial but is directly confronting situations, which is how a thriving ecosystem should be responding.
Watch the webinar:
Is WordPress’ Market share Declining? And What Should Product Businesses Do About it?
Featured Image by Shutterstock/Krakenimages.com
SEO
Google’s New Support For AVIF Images May Boost SEO
![Google's New Support For AVIF Images May Boost SEO Google's New Support For AVIF Images May Boost SEO](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/Googles-New-Support-For-AVIF-Images-May-Boost-SEO.jpg)
Google announced that images in the AVIF file format will now be eligible to be shown in Google Search and Google Images, including all platforms that surface Google Search data. AVIF will dramatically lower image sizes and improve Core Web Vitals scores, particularly Largest Contentful Paint.
How AVIF Can Improve SEO
Getting pages crawled and indexed are the first step of effective SEO. Anything that lowers file size and speeds up web page rendering will help search crawlers get to the content faster and improve the amount of pages crawled.
Google’s crawl budget documentation recommends increasing the speeds of page loading and rendering as a way to avoid receiving “Hostload exceeded” warnings.
It also says that faster loading times enables Googlebot to crawl more pages:
Improve your site’s crawl efficiency
Increase your page loading speed
Google’s crawling is limited by bandwidth, time, and availability of Googlebot instances. If your server responds to requests quicker, we might be able to crawl more pages on your site.
What Is AVIF?
AVIF (AVI Image File Format) is a next generation open source image file format that combines the best of JPEG, PNG, and GIF image file formats but in a more compressed format for smaller image files (by 50% for JPEG format).
AVIF supports transparency like PNG and photographic images like JPEG does but does but with a higher level of dynamic range, deeper blacks, and better compression (meaning smaller file sizes). AVIF even supports animation like GIF does.
AVIF Versus WebP
AVIF is generally a better file format than WebP in terms of smaller files size (compression) and image quality. WebP is better for lossless images, where maintaining high quality regardless of file size is more important. But for everyday web usage, AVIF is the better choice.
See also: 12 Important Image SEO Tips You Need To Know
Is AVIF Supported?
AVIF is currently supported by Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Opera, and Safari browsers. Not all content management systems support AVIF. However, both WordPress and Joomla support AVIF. In terms of CDN, Cloudflare also already supports AVIF.
I couldn’t at this time ascertain whether Bing supports AVIF files and will update this article once I find out.
Current website usage of AVIF stands at 0.2% but now that it’s available to surfaced in Google Search, expect that percentage to grow. AVIF images will probably become a standard image format because of its high compression will help sites perform far better than they currently do with JPEG and PNG formats.
Research conducted in July 2024 by Joost de Valk (founder of Yoast, ) discovered that social media platforms don’t all support AVIF files. He found that LinkedIn, Mastodon, Slack, and Twitter/X do not currently support AVIF but that Facebook, Pinterest, Threads and WhatsApp do support it.
AVIF Images Are Automatically Indexable By Google
According to Google’s announcement there is nothing special that needs to be done to make AVIF image files indexable.
“Over the recent years, AVIF has become one of the most commonly used image formats on the web. We’re happy to announce that AVIF is now a supported file type in Google Search, for Google Images as well as any place that uses images in Google Search. You don’t need to do anything special to have your AVIF files indexed by Google.”
Read Google’s announcement:
Supporting AVIF in Google Search
Featured Image by Shutterstock/Cast Of Thousands
SEO
CMOs Called Out For Reliance On AI Content For SEO
![CMOs Called Out For Reliance On AI Content For SEO CMOs Called Out For Reliance On AI Content For SEO](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/CMOs-Called-Out-For-Reliance-On-AI-Content-For-SEO.jpg)
Eli Schwartz, Author of Product-Led SEO, started a discussion on LinkedIn about there being too many CMOs (Chief Marketing Officers) who believe that AI written content is an SEO strategy. He predicted that there will be reckoning on the way after their strategies end in failure.
This is what Eli had to say:
“Too many CMOs think that AI-written content is an SEO strategy that will replace actual SEO.
This mistake is going to lead to an explosion in demand for SEO strategists to help them fix their traffic when they find out they might have been wrong.”
Everyone in the discussion, which received 54 comments, strongly agreed with Eli, except for one guy.
What Is Google’s Policy On AI Generated Content?
Google’s policy hasn’t changed although they did update their guidance and spam policies on March 5, 2024 at the same time as the rollout of the March 2024 Core Algorithm Update. Many publishers who used AI to create content subsequently reported losing rankings.
Yet it’s not said that using AI is enough to merit poor rankings, it’s content that is created for ranking purposes.
Google wrote these guidelines specifically for autogenerated content, including AI generated content (Wayback machine copy dated March 6, 2024)
“Our long-standing spam policy has been that use of automation, including generative AI, is spam if the primary purpose is manipulating ranking in Search results. The updated policy is in the same spirit of our previous policy and based on the same principle. It’s been expanded to account for more sophisticated scaled content creation methods where it isn’t always clear whether low quality content was created purely through automation.
Our new policy is meant to help people focus more clearly on the idea that producing content at scale is abusive if done for the purpose of manipulating search rankings and that this applies whether automation or humans are involved.”
Many in Eli’s discussion were in agreement that reliance on AI by some organizations may come to haunt them, except for that one guy in the discussion
Read the discussion on LinkedIn:
Too many CMOs think that AI-written content is an SEO strategy that will replace actual SEO
Featured Image by Shutterstock/Cast Of Thousands
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