SEO Coders Need to Think Beyond Google for Search Algorithms

In the search engine optimization world, practitioners used to pay attention to trends and algorithmic signals of "The Big Three" search engines, to wit: Google, Bing and Yahoo. In recent years, Yahoo has lost relevance, thus paving the way for new competition such as DuckDuckGo. While this search engine has been around for a little over a decade, its newfound relevance has a lot to do with data privacy concerns, and this is something that should be of interest to SEO professionals. The market share commanded by DuckDuckGo pales in comparison to Google and even Bing, but a different image emerges when looking at the number of users and daily searches. The company and development team behind DuckDuckGo reported about 760 million queries in September 2018; this may no seem like much at a time when Google is reporting an average 165 billion searches per month, but the SEO potential is certainly there to explore. The bulk of the top listings shown on the DuckDuckGo search engine results page (SERP) comes from the Bing algorithm; in this sense, optimizing for DuckDuckGo is similar to Yahoo, although many users who would normally use Bing prefer using DuckDuckGo because of layout, lack of filters and interesting features such as keyboard shortcuts. Two sectors that report DuckDuckGo as a major referrer are travel and fast manufactured consumer goods, particularly when an older demographic is targeted. It is not surprising to find older users attracted to DuckDuckGo, but this does not mean the elderly; we are talking about Generation X users who grew up with desktop systems, enjoy using advanced keyboard shortcuts and are concerned about the extensive data collection practices of Google. A few alternative web browsers available for download and packaged as part of Linux desktop distributions have chosen DuckDuckGo as their primary search engine provider; this means that more tech-savvy users are bound to discover this search engine and make it their favorite for queries. In the end, SEO professionals should not dismiss DuckDuckGo too quickly because doing so would be akin to ignoring an important demographic and potential referral traffic. For more information click here https://www.reddit.com/r/SEO/comments/9oy51s/howmanypeopleuseduckduckgo/.