Upstart Search Engine DuckDuckGo Gets Prominent Placement in Opera Browser

Frederic Lardinois

Oct 20, 2011 — 1 min read

Two of my favorite tech underdogs, the privacy-focused search engine DuckDuckGo and the desktop version of Opera’s browser, have finally banded together. While most browsers only feature the most popular three or four search engines in their default search engine list, Opera’s latest release now also includes DuckDuckGo as an option next to the likes of Google, Bing and Yahoo.

That’s a major win for a small search engine that hasn’t really made a large splash outside of the tech community yet (though it was named one of the “50 Best Websites of 2011” by Time magazine recently).

Neither the Opera nor the DuckDuckGo teams would discuss the terms of this deal.

DuckDuckGo has been around for a while now, but it feels like it has only really been hitting its stride over the last few months. Thanks to a focus on privacy and ease of use, the site has found quite a few fans recently. Unlike other search engines, for example, the site doesn’t track you and your searches are never filtered. In many ways, DuckDuckGo is quite similar to the first incarnations of Google (though it features some advanced search functionality as well).

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