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.
