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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.'"
(Score: 3, Informative) by ztoth on Thursday February 20 2014, @10:53PM
I've been using DDG for years (i.e. since the privacy reveals), pretty much exclusively. It gives results good enough, I rarely have to "fall back" to G or other engines.
One killer feature DDG provides is called !bang [duckduckgo.com], which allows you to search for keywords in specific websites very easily, without going to that website first. For example, if you type "!a arduino" in DDG, it will take you to Amazon and search arduino stuff for you. There's a shortcut for every major site and the list keeps growing. You can even do this !bang thing in the URL bar if DDG is your default engine, which has simplified my life a lot...
DDG lacks some features like image search. For that I use startpage, and with DDG's !bang feature it's as simple as typing "!spi natalie portman" in the URL bar :-)