This afternoon, Wolfram|Alpha announced that DuckDuckGo is an ‘official partner’ and the latter will be fully integrating their open API announced in January. This will enable DuckDuckGo to provide Wolfram|Alpha’s computational knowledge engine into its offerings, providing users with dynamically computationally relevant facts.
This is a good move for DuckDuckGo whose focus on simplicity, privacy and fervent stance against personalisation has proved popular in certain circles such as Hacker News.
This isn’t the first search engine that DuckDuckGo has teamed up with in order to provide their results. In fact, looking at the list of partners they use for search, you may struggle to find a Google competitor not listed. DuckDuckGo list Bing, Yahoo, Blekko, Wolphram|Alpha and a long list of crowdsourced sites as sources for their search results, as well as their own crawler.
However, despite an impressive list of partners and attempts to emphasize a unique approach to search (including zero click results and a strong approach to spam removal), DuckDuckGo has barely made a splash after 3 years in the market.
The search engine attracts 2.5 million searches a month, making it unlikely that this will make much of a difference in search market share to either party.
However, the partnership potentially extends Wolfram|Alpha’s influence beyond the scientific community and into the elite hacker set.
Putting Wolfram|Alpha’s awesome computational engine, and irreverent personality, in front of a crowd who have a natural propensity for math could be an unpredictable but fruitful match.