Dev.SN

DuckDuckGo Is Google's Tiniest Fiercest Competitor

posted by mattie_p on Thursday February 20 2014, @06:31PM   
from the tor-not-required dept.

Papas Fritas writes:

"There's an interesting read today by John Paul Titlow at FastCoLabs about DuckDuckGo, a search engine launched in 2008 that is now doing 4 million search queries per day and growing 200-500% annually. DuckDuckGo's secret weapon is hardcore privacy. When you do a search from DuckDuckGo's website or one of its mobile apps, it doesn't know who you are. There are no user accounts. Your IP address isn't logged by default. The site doesn't use search cookies to keep track of what you do over time or where else you go online.

'If you look at the logs of people's search sessions, they're the most personal thing on the Internet,' says founder Gabriel Weinberg. 'Unlike Facebook, where you choose what to post, with search you're typing in medical and financial problems and all sorts of other things. You're not thinking about the privacy implications of your search history.' DuckDuckGo's no-holds-barred approach to privacy gives the search engine a unique selling point as Google gobbles up more private user data. 'It was extreme at the time,' says Weinberg. 'And it still may be considered extreme by some people, but I think it's becoming less extreme nowadays. In the last year, it's become obvious why people don't want to be tracked.'"

• Re:Search Result Quality Re:Search Result Quality (Score: 3, Informative) by Cactus on Thursday February 20 2014, @07:54PM

  by Cactus (32) on Thursday February 20 2014, @07:54PM (#3885) Journal

  I have (in the past) used DDG as my default / only search engine in Firefox for months at a time. The search results are ... DIFFERENT. Maybe worse, depending on what you need, certainly better if you need unadulterated results, but different. The best part is the !Commands. If you change the appropriate about:config entries, you can designate specific sites to search in your address bar. !yt will go straight to a YouTube results page. !w will go straight to Wikipedia. Full list here [duckduckgo.com].
  They have a few other neat features, but the !bang commands are easily my favorite. Only reason I don't use it now is I ended up doing a full wipe of my comp, and I (still) haven't gotten around to redoing the about:config.

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• Re:Search Result Quality (Score: 2, Informative) by MrNemesis on Friday February 21 2014, @06:42AM

  by MrNemesis (1582) on Friday February 21 2014, @06:42AM (#4212)

  Haven't you been able to do this in browsers themselves for years? In FF and Opera, you can right-click on a website's search box and use the "Add a keywords for this search" or whatever the Opera version is called; annoyingly it insists on saving it as a bookmark but you can define IMDB as, say, "imdb" and typing in "imdb some film wot I want to search for" will ping you off to IMDB's search page. Much faster IMHO and with zero reliance on a third party, and much more portable than relying exclusively on about:config hackery.

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