Now that Google does not even hide that they monitor you, it’s good to have an alternative. The search engine DuckDuckGo has had huge growth in recent months.
In 2013, Edward Snowden released documents proving that the NSA was conducting warrantless online surveillance at a massive scale, something many had already suspected. In the subsequent year, many people have sought out more secure software to help ensure that their digital privacy remains intact. Groups such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation have subsequently promoted alternatives to popular software which can be easily adopted; such as DuckDuckGo to replace Google. As a result, DuckDuckGo’s popularity has skyrocketed.
According to newest stats from Alexa.com, DuckDuckGo has almost doubled its global popularity in the past year – ranked as the 400th most popular website. When you dig down to the national scale, it’s ranked 255th in the US, 177th in Germany, 186th in France, 193rd in the UK, and 715th in China. The search engine is far more popular than other privacy oriented search engines such as Ixquick or Searx.
DuckDuckGo has been a bit of a magnet for privacy-oriented folk with it promising not to store personal information, track you around with ads, or in any other fashion.
ht/ all too much
I love it and would never change, it’s searches are right on the money every time.
I use it but find that their search results are nowhere near as good as “the evil one” for the most part. I hope they will be able to improve their algorithms soon such that I can completely ditch “the evil one”.
I also use Ixquick some which supposedly uses “the evil one’s” search algorithms but prevents them from tracking you. They do produce better search results than DDG but I’m unsure as to how effective they block tracking by “the evil one”.
Yeah DDG’s results aren’t as good, but hopefully that can improve quickly as more people utilize it.
At the very least, sign up for DDG’s email series on privacy.
Another option to consider is using the TOR browser:
“The Tor software protects you by bouncing your communications around a distributed network of relays run by volunteers all around the world: it prevents somebody watching your Internet connection from learning what sites you visit, it prevents the sites you visit from learning your physical location, and it lets you access sites which are blocked.”
https://www.torproject.org/projects/torbrowser.html.en
https://3g2upl4pq6kufc4m.onion/
I have DDG as default search. A few weeks ago, don’t remember who,but a poster here mentioned the Brave browser by the ousted firefux u guy. Been using it with no problems, I like it.
I see DuckDuckGo is now a preloaded option on the iPhone. Click Settings>Safari>Search Engines.
Bing also gives pretty good results.
Aside from evilness, Google’s algorithms are so overcommercialized that results now are almost useless. That will hurt GOOG as much as privacy concerns.
When an institution comes out with a slogan “Don’t be evil” you know that there is an activist agenda right off the bat which is guaranteed to go the “absolute power corrupts absolutely” route.
I’ve been using DDG, and their results are OK for most searches, but it’s a weaning process and I don’t use it exclusively. I still use the goog for image search, or if DDG can’t get me the information I need. It will improve.
I still miss the original Northern Lights engine from the late 90s. It categorized the results for a term (commercial, historical, etc). It was very handy, and my preference before goog became a leviathan.
I signed up and sent the link on to my email list.
On my IPhone, DDG is the only way I can read IOTWREPORT, without having pop-ups blocking access and freezing the site.
Thanks for the reminder about DDG. Bookmarked it now.
Is DDG a search engine, browser or both? For searches I use Startpage. I haven’t googled in years.