The New York Times – “Gabriel Weinberg is taking aim at Google from a small building 20 miles west of Philadelphia that looks like a fake castle. An optometrist has an office downstairs. Mr. Weinberg’s company, DuckDuckGo, has become one of the feistiest adversaries of Google. Started over a decade ago, DuckDuckGo offers a privacy-focused alternative to Google’s search engine. The company’s share of the search engine market is still tiny — about 1 percent compared with Google’s 85 percent, according to StatCounter. But it has tripled over the past two years and is now handling around 40 million searches a day. It has also made a profit in each of the last five years, Mr. Weinberg said. Mr. Weinberg, 40, is among the most outspoken critics of the internet giants. DuckDuckGo’s chief executive has repeatedly called for new privacy-focused legislation and has warned at hearings and in newspaper opinion pieces about the problems that big companies can cause by tracking our every move online. But the challenges faced by DuckDuckGo reflect just how difficult it is to take on the giants and build an internet business that is focused on the privacy of its users. After a decade, the private company’s modest success is an indication that, even as regulators around the world consider tougher rules for the data-tracking methods of big tech companies, selling consumers on privacy-focused services is still an uphill battle. Like other search companies, DuckDuckGo displays ads at the top of each search page. But unlike others, it does not track the online behavior of its users to personalize the ads…”