Valley Forge, PA, Apr. 30, 2009 - Duck Duck Go, a new search engine, officially released its Firefox toolbar today for widespread public use.
The Duck Duck Go Toolbar, now out of beta, prevents users from going to 44 million spam or parked domains, and all of the pages within them. These domains often come up in search results (in other search engines) and by slightly mistyping Web addresses.
For example, if you have the toolbar installed and you type in yotube.com, it will alert you of the mistake and ask "Did you mean youtube.com?" After a few seconds, it will then automatically redirect you to the suggested site.
Gabriel Weinberg, Duck Duck Go's Founder and CEO, explained: "By using our toolbar, users can help us fight typosquatting and related practices. The less people go to these spam Web sites, the less of them there will be in the long run."
These useless Web sites have also been removed from Duck Duck Go's search results, leaving their results with much less spam than other search engines. Using a random sample of 10,000 blocked domains, Duck Duck Go estimates that roughly 28% of the total list, or about 12 million spam/parked domains, are in Google's index.
To put these numbers in perspective, there are approximately 80 million total .com domains, 68 million of which have active Web sites. There are 28 million .com domains on the Duck Duck Go block list. So depending on how you look at it, 35-41% of all .com domains are useless Web sites. Duck Duck Go saves you the trouble of visiting those useless sites.
Blocked domains are discovered through regular Web crawls, in partnership with The Parked Domains Project. Top level domains covered are .com, .net, .org, .us, .info, .biz, .coop, .mobi, and .aero, for a total of about 110 million domains out of the estimated 180 million domains across all top level domains.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/10536
Screen shot
***
About Duck Duck Go - Duck Duck Go is a new search engine with less garbage and better results. With less clicking forward and back between results, it is for anyone who wants to get information faster. Duck Duck Go is very different than other search engines. Major differences include Zero-click Information, Category Pages, ambiguous keyword detection, semantic topic detection (for more relevant results), simpler presentation of results and much less spam.
http://duckduckgo.com/
http://duckduckgo.com/press.html
About The Parked Domains Project - The Parked Domains Project compiles and maintains a list of parked domains throughout the Internet. A parked domain is an Internet site without anything real behind it, and often just advertisements. The Parked Domains Project regularly crawls the Web looking for these domains.
Contact
Gabriel Weinberg
Duck Duck Go Founder and CEO
yegg@alum.mit.edu, (617) 974-2456
Files
Follow us on
and
!