DuckDuckGo - Privacy Conscious Internet search engine is blocked in China now. According to a tweet posted on Sunday by CEO and founder Gabriel Weinberg.
Weinberg told TechInAsia that he has “no idea” when it happened exactly. We also cannot pinpoint an exact date, but it was accessible in China earlier in the summer. DuckDuckGo had been working fine in mainland China since its inception.
DuckDuckGo joins search giant Google as the target of a Great Firewall of China. In June of this year, China reportedly blocked several Google sites, including its search page.
Only foreign search engines that have Chinese servers, such as Bing and Yahoo, work in China. But, operating under Chinese media laws, both Bing and Yahoo heavily censor their search results – in contrast to Google and DuckDuckGo, TechInAsia reports.
In an email exchange with CNET, Weinberg said he learned of the block in China through online mentions but doesn’t know why it happened. He didn’t seem overly concerned about China’s action, noting that the site doesn’t get much traffic from the country. He added that he has no plans to reach out to anyone in China to pursue the matter further.