DuckDuckGo CEO Criticizes Lengthy Process to Move Away from Google

During an antitrust trial, the founder of DuckDuckGo, a search engine focused on privacy, stated that despite being established around 15 years ago, the company has struggled to gain a significant market share due to the challenge consumers face in switching from Google, which is set as the default option on computer screens.

“It’s a lot harder to change than it should be,” CEO Gabriel Weinberg said in federal court Thursday. “There are too many steps.”

Weinberg testified Thursday in the government’s antitrust lawsuit against Google’s parent company, Alphabet Inc. The Justice Department alleges that Google pays more than $10 billion a year to tech rivals, smartphone makers and wireless service providers to make it the pre-selected option or default on computers and mobile devices. phones.

By illegally maintaining this monopoly, the government claims Google has prevented rival search engines, such as Microsoft Corp.’s Bing and DuckDuckGo, from gaining the scale needed to compete. Google says it won market share, which the government has pegged at nearly 90 percent, because it has the best search engine.

Founded in 2008, DuckDuckGo claims to offer better protection against online tracking and more transparency about the use of personal data. DuckDuckGo says that the ads it serves are based on user-generated search results, rather than the tracking algorithms commonly used by other search engines.

It currently has about 2.5 percent of the search market, Weinberg said, and does about 100 million searches a day. Weinberg said that about 30 to 40 percent of DuckDuckGo’s users have a “strong preference” for privacy, and that most of the company’s users are migrating from Google. The company considers Google “by far” its biggest competitor.

But default settings that favor Google prevent users from switching to DuckDuckGo even if they value privacy, Weinberg said. The company has said that consumers should be able to choose their default search engine with a single click, as opposed to complicated steps involving at least 15 on Android systems.

Google executives have insisted that people have more search options than ever, and that switching from defaults is very easy.

John Schmidtlein, a lawyer representing Google, said in opening statements last week that Microsoft prefers its own search engine to Bing on Windows PCs, but most PC users switch to Google “because it’s a better product.”

“It’s literally four taps on the phone,” Schmidtlein said of the ease of changing the default search engine on Apple Inc’s Safari web browser. “Go to settings, tap Safari, then search engine and make your selection. It will take a few seconds.”