DuckDuckGo Profits Off Microsoft Ads While Neeva Sells to Snowflake, Revealing Challenges for Google Search Rivals
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DuckDuckGo has been profitable since 2014, makes money from Microsoft search ads, and distributes profits to shareholders rather than reinvesting in search innovation, per the filing. It has an estimated 100M global users but only a 2.5% U.S. search market share.
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The filing claims Neeva, founded by ex-Googlers, pivoted from consumer search to enterprise search and sold to Snowflake for $184M after struggling to compete with free search long-term. At its peak it had several million monthly users.
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Yahoo stopped crawling the web itself in 2009 after signing a Microsoft deal for algorithmic and paid search, allowing it to reduce search investment.
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Google argues it competes with mobile apps, websites, AI like ChatGPT, and social networks like TikTok, especially for younger users.
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The filing aims to show Google has innovated in search and that viable competition exists, despite revelations that Google pays Apple $18B to remain the iPhone’s default search engine.