What defines a search engine today? Ads, personalization and intrusion into our private lives would not be a bad first answer when you think about it. Because Google knows you inside out based on your search history. Heck it even keeps tabs on your location and crunches that data to map out all the places you’ve been to and serve up ads that in one way or the other are tied to that.
In a world where users are becoming very wary of their privacy on the internet particularly after the damning revelations of ex-NSA contractor Edward Snowden on the US government’s mass online surveillance programs, it is not surprising that many are turning to any tools they can find that promise them privacy when performing things like sending email and doing web searches.
One of the tools that users have turned to in recent years is something you don’t get to hear about every other time unless you’ve used it as well: the privacy-focused search engine DuckDuckGo.
So far, DuckDuckGo has registered 10 billion anonymous searches nearly half or which (4 billion) were performed in 2016 alone! Just 14 days into the new year, it already managed to register its highest ever number of single day anonymous searches – 14 million.
Think about that!
While Google’s Knowledge Graph is cool and all, users are increasingly becoming wary of the data they hand over to search engines and their owners and DuckDuckGo seems to be a good alternative so far.
In case you are not sold on DuckDuckGo as a potential Google search replacement, here are two of the reasons I turn to it some times:
- Expanding shortened URLs at a go thanks to integration with Untiny.com
- Quickly generating complex secure passwords (no need to ever type 123456, google or password as your password like most people have been doing when you have DuckDuckGo)
