Private internet search engine DuckDuckGo has been blocked in China

DuckDuckGo has long promoted itself as an alternative to Google Search that won’t track your history or tweak your results, but it looks like even the privacy-focused company can’t live up to Chinese standards. The smaller search engine has was blocked in China earlier this month though the news didn’t come out until more recently. Over the weekend DuckDuckGo founder and CEO Gabriel Weinberg confirmed the news on Twitter to a reporter from Tech in Asia. According to Great Fire, a site focused on tracking Chinese Internet censorship, the search engine was actually blocked earlier this month starting on Sept. 4.

DuckDuckGo, the privacy-focused search engine that lives in Google’s enormous shadow, has joined its big rival and plenty of other western tech firms in being blocked in China. DuckDuckGo founder and CEO Gabriel Weinberg confirmed the blockage to Tech In Asia this weekend, adding that he believes it started a few weeks ago. Weinberg says that he is unsure as to why the company got trapped in China’s internet censorship net. A search for duckduckgo.com on the Great Fire censorship monitoring site suggests that the plucky young search engine was indeed first blocked around September 4. Subsequent tests from Great Fire, which pings a range of URLs on a regular basis to identify whether they are blocked, suggest that the site is still not accessible in China. The past 18 months have seen much progress for DuckDuckGo. Its user base grew significantly amid Edward Snowden’s NSA revelations last year, ending 2013 withover 1 billion searches. An impressive number though that is, Google processes over 100 billion search queries each month — that said, DuckDuckGo has established itself as an option for those that appreciate its approach to privacy.