NETTING IT OUT

DickDickGo is a search engine that is worth switching to as your default. It works on the Web and as an app on mobile devices. It is probably the most customer-centric search engine you’ll find; not because it personalizes results, but because it doesn’t. DuckDuckGo has a number of advantages over Google and other commonly used search engines.

First, it does not track your searches, nor does it capture what you click on. So your privacy is safe and marketers can’t follow you around with their annoying ads based on things they think you care about. And, if a government or law enforcement agency asks to see any information about what you’ve been looking up, DuckDuckGo can’t provide that information because they don’t have it.

Second, it provides a clean, uncluttered set of results, often with an “Instant Answer” at the top of the list. This is NOT a sponsored search. It is, in fact, the most likely answer you’re seeking.

Third, it quickly gives you the authoritative site you may be seeking, e.g., a quick link to a company’s official web site. (These links may be sponsored, but they aren’t misleading, e.g., if you are looking for American Airlines, you won’t see a competitor featured in the search results.)

Fourth, it is an open platform for customer innovation. People can suggest and request vertical search (e.g., topic-specific) search engines they’d like to have included. Developers can offer their own integrations for specific Web sites, vertical search engines, and/or databases.

Fifth, it is built on top of Bing and Yahoo Search, but also prioritizes crowdsourced answers from sites like Wikipedia, Quora, StackExchange, and other Q&A sites where experts hang out and answer one another’s questions.

© 2013 DuckDuckGo

DuckDuckGo gained quite a bit of attention when it advertised on this billboard in early 2011 in Google’s back yard on Highway 101 near San Francisco.

WHY USE DUCKDUCKGO INSTEAD OF GOOGLE OR BING?

None of Your Searches Are Tracked, Connected Together, Nor Connected to You

With the recent disclosures that the National Security Agency is tracking everything we do online as well as our phone calls, many people have become much more concerned about the lack of privacy for their online or phone communication.
Although we might have been somewhat paranoid before, we now realize that everything we do online—every search we do, every site we navigate, every click we make—is being vacuumed up into huge big data repositories that are mined by marketers, but can also be analyzed by police or investigators, typically without our knowledge or consent.

One of the easiest ways to avoid contributing to the stash of data being gathered about you is to change the search engine you use from Google, or Bing, or something else, to DuckDuckGo.

How does this work? How does DuckDuckGo avoid collecting information about you? Particularly since their business model relies on being paid for clickthroughs?

Here’s their explanation…

(Download the PDF to read the entire article.)