Gabriel Weinberg, the founder of DuckDuckGo, testified in the courtroom of the U.S. District Court in Washington several weeks ago. He was testifying in what is being described as one of the most significant antitrust trials in a generation. And it was initially sealed.

After facing criticism from antitrust advocates over a lack of public access, Judge Amit Mehta ordered the release of large parts of Weinberg’s and Apple AI boss John Giannandrea's testimony to the public.

Weinberg testified about the uphill battle small search engine companies face when competing with tech behemoth Google. And he pointed to various obstacles faced by his company.

The heart of the matter involves Google's agreements with phone manufacturers and equipment producers, which establish its product as the default search option on a multitude of devices.

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Google Contracts Block Competitors  

As Weinberg explained these contracts create formidable hurdles for competitors. "We hit an obstacle with Google's contracts," Weinberg said.

The U.S. Department of Justice argues that Google's financial incentives to companies like Apple and Verizon to lock in its search engine as the default choice on laptops and smartphones have suppressed competition. In contrast, Google maintains its dominant position is a result of superior product quality.

Google claims that even when it secures the default search position on devices, users can easily switch to alternative search engines with a few clicks. 

However, Weinberg's testimony suggests that transitioning from Google is anything but straightforward. “The search defaults are the primary barrier,’' he said. “It’s too many steps.’'

He detailed that it often requires as many as 30 to 50 steps to change default settings across multiple devices. Simplifying this process to a single click could make a significant difference in user adoption, according to Weinberg.

DuckDuckGo users' privacy

A MIT graduate, Weinberg launched DuckDuckGo from his Pennsylvania basement in 2008, and the company began carving its niche as a search engine that prioritizes user privacy. 

The pledge not to track user search activity and online behavior has been a cornerstone of the DuckDuckGo ethos, as tracking data can be employed to create invasive user-profiles and unsettling advertisements. "People don't like ads that follow them around," Weinberg emphasized, asserting that privacy is a paramount concern for users, often outweighing their pursuit of the best search results.

While DuckDuckGo still generates revenue from advertising, it utilizes a contextual advertising model, tailoring ads to users' real-time search queries rather than building comprehensive user profiles for targeted marketing. 

This unique focus on privacy helped the company attract a broader user base, especially in the wake of revelations like the Edward Snowden saga and the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which unveiled how personal data could be exploited by digital service providers and data brokers.

DuckDuckGo, a privately held company, has not disclosed its financials but claims profitability and annual revenues exceeding $100 million. In contrast, these figures pale in comparison to Google's parent company, Alphabet, which raked in an astonishing $283 billion in revenue last year.

Despite its commitment to user privacy and its position as a prominent alternative search engine, DuckDuckGo still captures only 2.5% of U.S. search queries, as confirmed by Weinberg's testimony.

Google Cross-Examines Weinberg 

Under cross-examination by Google's legal team, Weinberg admitted that DuckDuckGo's search capability was not entirely homegrown but originated from Microsoft's Bing search engine. Furthermore, the company had allowed Microsoft to track some of its users, a practice only addressed in 2022 after a security researcher brought it to their attention.

In a previous testimony, Eric Lehman, a former Google software engineer, cast doubt on the U.S. Department of Justice's central argument – that Google's dominance primarily stems from amassing vast amounts of user data, which the company leverages to enhance future searches more rapidly than its competitors.

 Lehman suggested that recent advancements in machine learning have reached a point where computers can evaluate text independently, eliminating the need to rely on user-click data.

In a 2018 email introduced as evidence, Lehman asserted that Google's competitors, including Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, China's Baidu, Russia's Yandex, and startups, could employ machine learning to enhance internet searches and challenge Google's supremacy in the industry.

 He stated, "Huge amounts of user feedback can be largely replaced by unsupervised learning of raw text."

Lehman expressed his belief that search engines may gradually shift away from reliance on user data and toward increased reliance on machine learning to deliver more accurate and relevant results.