DuckDuckGo – the new search engine for those who value privacy

For most of us, search engine means Google, isn’t it? And of course, there are a few among us who use Yahoo and Bing.

But DuckDuckGo? What is that?

DuckDuckGo is a relatively new search engine that emphasizes on the searcher’s privacy, unlike say someone like Google who tracks every movement of a searcher.

Each time you search using DuckDuckGo, no data of yours will be stored that could tie your searches to you personally. And there would not be any search history also, which you or anyone else could access later.

So if you are someone who gives a lot of importance to personal privacy, then DuckDuckGo is the search engine you must go for every time you have to search the web.

It is true however that it is extremely difficult to untangle yourself from Google.

But people are increasingly becoming aware of privacy and about how Google tracks people online and make data profiles for advertisers.

After making its debut in 2008 traffic to DuckDuckGo has been increasing rapidly and it has hosted 22 billion anonymous searches till now.

Image Courtesy: Forbes

DuckDuckGo gives you quality results and even has the voice search option available.

It uses its own search engine bot called DuckDuckBot and up to 400 other resources including Yahoo, Bing, Yandex and Wikipedia to compile the search results.

Benefits of using DuckDuckGo

• The most important benefit of using DuckDuckGo is user privacy. They don’t store any user information and there is no search history.
• You can search in DuckDuckGo and visit the website, but the website wouldn’t get to know any of your personal detail and hence it prevents search leakage.
• You can get unbiased results from DuckDuckGo. In Google, you will often get results that are based on your previous search history. In DuckDuckGo everyone who uses the same search query gets the same result.
• You can remove all your data from DuckDuckGo search with a simple click of a button.
  Search results in DuckDuckGo aren’t loaded with ads. DuckDuckGo keeps ads to the minimum.
• You can have direct contact with the developer team of DuckDuckGo if you wish so and you can even contribute through features, bug reports etc.

How DuckDuckGo makes money

While search engines like Google make money by showing targeted ads to the visitors using the stored user data, DuckDuckGo shows ads based on keywords.

If the keyword searched is ‘car’, then DuckDuckGo will show ads related to car and make money out of that ads.

So next time when you have to search the web, don’t “Google it”, “Duck it”.