A Firefox from the new search engine Duck Duck Go is now out of beta. It blocks 44 million spam domains, 28% of which are found in Google.

In my interview with Gabriel Weinberg, Duck Duck Go’s Founder and CEO, a couple of weeks ago, he explained how his brand new search engine has partnered with The Parked Domains Project. That project regularly crawls the Web and marks spam and parked domains. It is now marking 44 million pages, which depending on how you count, is approximately between 30-40% of the whole Internet.

How it works

The Duck Duck Go Toolbar uses the same data to prevent users from going to 44 million spam or parked domains. In other search engines, these domains often come up in search results and by slightly mistyping Web addresses.

Here is an example: If you have the toolbar installed and by mistake you type in yotube.com in stead of youtube.com, it will alert you of the mistake and ask “Did you mean youtube.com?” After a few seconds, it will then automatically redirect you to the suggested site.

Spam is a big problem

According to Gabriel Weinberg, there are approximately 80 million total .com domains, 68 million of which have active Web sites. The Duck Duck Go block list has 28 million .com domains. Depending on how you look at it, 35-41% of all .com domains are useless Web sites. With the new toolbar, you will never have to visit those useless sites.

Weinberg explains how using the toolbar also helps eradicate spam in the long run: “By using our toolbar, users can help fight typosquatting and related practices. The less people go to these spam Web sites, the less of them there will be in the long run.”

Get the Duck Duck Go toolbar.