DuckDuckGo
The ever increasing incidents of security breaches, increased state surveillance and the widespread concern about data sharing have alarmed the majority of netizens who want to protect their personal information more than ever. Recently the top data leak scandal by Facebook spooked the users by exposing their privacy. The data leak by one of the esteemed organization in the market of the internet, compromised with the users’ privacy.
The difference from Other Search Engines
Even when we search for anything even in private or incognito mode on other search engines like Bing or Google, our browsing history remains visible to our employer, Internet Service Provider or the websites that we visit. Our IP address too doesn’t remain hidden. Our location can be traced down using this piece of information and thus revealing our identity.
DuckDuckGo is a privacy-focused new competitor to the search engine king Google. This search engine doesn’t collect or share anyone’s history or clicks and avoids cookies. Therefore, the searches are safe and less frequently hampered by the bunch of advertisements. The search engine itself has the web crawler which can block numerous ad trackers on each website visited by the user. Due to fewer ads, its interface is a bit cleaner and less creepy too (lol!). The users will surely have a lesser probability of falling for ad-bait terms and thus gives better search experiences.
Features of DuckDuckGo
The quality of the search results of this avant-garde search engine is not much different from the established search engines. The result which you expect from Google or Bing will be provided by DuckDuckGo since its results are a compilation of a variety of trusted sources like Bing, Yahoo! Search BOSS, Wikipedia, DuckDuckBot (its own web crawler) and other crowded sites. According to the latest tweet by DuckDuckGo made on 2 Feb 2019 itself, it served 1 billion searches in January itself (source- https://t.co/8FS0QcGhJ2). It’s indeed a great start of the year.
What Makes it Unique?
Other search engines usually collect data of the users and then sell it to the advertisers to make money. But this search engine adopts another approach. Instead of invading the user’s personal information, it uses keywords. The ads are displayed corresponding to the keywords only. For example, when user types in ‘house’ then only advertisements on the house will be displayed. In an interview, the owner of the DuckDuckGo, Weinberg said that they don’t want to deliver profitable ads by compromising with the user’s privacy. He added that the company doesn’t need a bunch of lucrative ads and keywords are the only thing they need to make money.
The most visited websites like Amazon, YouTube, etc. can be easily found using the “bang” feature. It generated some buzz by providing the keyboard shortcut to the top sites. For example, type in “yt!” to open YouTube or “a!” to go to Amazon.
Origin of the Name
DuckDuckDuckGo doesn’t have any interesting story behind its name. Yet to be specific, it derived its name from the game Duck, Duck, Goose. It is not a metaphor; the founder simply liked the name.
The credibility of DuckDuckGo among the users
The use of the search engine is soaring high because the search results are not generated based on a user’s previous interest or by storing their information and later filtering out the relevant ones. It is not cluttered with lots of advertisements. It doesn’t offer user logins and provides an encrypted connection by default even to the non-logged in users. Unlike Google which provides encrypted connection to the logged in users only. Therefore, this search engine is gaining credibility worldwide.
The proprietor of the search engine, Gabriel Weinberg, decided to offer a zero-tracking search engine when he noticed the growing amount of junk sites in established search engine’s results. The data experts gamed the giant’s algorithm of those search engines and pushed numerous junk sites in the search results. It annoys the users and makes the result look creepy.
Conclusion
Though the DuckDuckGo search engine is gaining popularity worldwide and has come a far way from where it began. Starting with 10 million searches in a month in October 2011 to 1 billion searches in the month of January 2019, it has emerged as the only potential rival to the most commonly used search engine Google. The thriving of the search engine attracted the attention of the venture capital firm behind Twitter, known as Union Square Ventures.
Though this search engine could be the biggest long-term threat to Google, yet it has a long way to go. Google is the default search engine on most browsers, and 95% of people never change their default settings on anything. Google is still the most widely used search engine. It will be challenging for DuckDuckGo to replace Google completely in the near future. However, the market for DuckDuckGo will surely continue to increase, and loss of regular users of established search engine seems inevitable with the increasing concern of the search engine for the user’s privacy.
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