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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 zafiro17 on Friday February 21 2014, @08:05AM
I use DDG as my primary search engine and stick to it whenever possible. It's not perfect - unfortunately, Google definitely provides better results and also offers things like address and image search that are pretty darned useful.
But I'm willing to usually forego those aspects in order to prevent Google from getting more of my data. Seriously, to all the people wondering if the NSA isn't secretely pasting your packets back together, keep a grip on the big picture! Whatever the NSA might be doing to DDG, they're also doing it to Google, so it is a tie. Meanwhile, DDG makes it a policy to keep your searches private and untracked, while Google makes it a policy to rope you increasingly into their ecosystem the way Microsoft did so effectively with their products back in the 90s.
I really hate it that Google asked me a hundred times if I wanted to convert my Youtube profile to a Google Plus profile. A said "no" every single time, and then they went ahead and did it anyway, goddammit. A week later, I commented on some video and Google went ahead and published that comment on my G+ feed. WTF! It makes me not want to even use Youtube anymore.
DDG might be a search engine whose searches aren't the number 1. But it's worth it in order to spread my data around more providers instead of just letting Google have it all. (I also use fastmail.fm for IMAP email, fruux.com for calendaring and addressbook, and Opera for a browser). My two big failures in that area are and Android phone in my pocket (can't help it, I love the Note III) and using G+ as a place to post mindless drivel.
DDG remains my go-to search engine and I think you should use it too. Also, cute duck icon!
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