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posted by mattie_p on Thursday February 20 2014, @06:31PM   Printer-friendly
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.'"

 
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  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by pp on Thursday February 20 2014, @10:25PM

    by pp (1566) on Thursday February 20 2014, @10:25PM (#3997)

    They farm out their results from various sources, but unfortunately they pick up some of the quirks and errors from their result sources.

    One of the things that bugs me the most about Google, which DDG seems to do too, is the silent dropping of search terms to boost the number of results. It's as if getting two million irrelevant results is better than getting the four results that you actually want.

    The worst part is that the search term dropping is silent in DDG. I believe that Google at least tells you when certain terms aren't present in a particular result. In DDG, you can't always tell.

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