App of the Week: Duck Duck Go

Sun, 30 Jun 2013 18:00:00 +0000

Duck Duck Go, the search engine that has sworn an oath on all that is holy and good never to track you or save any of your personal information in any way, shape or form, is capitalizing on its post-NSA surveillance debacle popularity. This week Duck Duck Go released a "Search & Stories" app for the iOS platform. (An Android Duck Duck Go app has existed since 2011.)

The new app is an odd bird. It includes the basic search functionality that we require from a search engine, but then layers a rudimentary story recommendation service on top. Just now, Duck Duck Go suggested a short news squib about a two-headed turtle named Thelma and Louise, a Wall Street Journal article warning against letting your children grow up to be tennis pros, and a story about Indiana basketball player Victor Oladipo wearing Google Glass to the NBA draft.

In an announcement of the new app, Duck Duck Go declared that the stories had "proven social value" and were generated by "by leveraging hand-selected, crowd-sourced, curated feeds." As explained by Duck Duck Go founder Gabriel Weinberg, what that basically means is that Duck Duck Go scoops up stories that reach the top of "most emailed" or "most shared" lists at sites like Reddit or the WSJ or Business Insider.

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App of the Week: Duck Duck Go