Privacy has never been a choice; It has always been a concern.
Duckduckgo is the first choice of every internet savvy whenever they look for a safe search engine. Although with the years of Google searches climbing and establishing Google as the top search engine in the world, many search engines have come and exited the list of the new arenas of searches. Out of them, Duckduckgo stays an alternative to Google search. Of course, we know that Google is not just a search engine but has many features that make it stand out. But people are willing to switch their search preferences because of privacy concerns.
Is Google free?
How is Google always free? Your every move is recorded, and Google uses it for targeting advertising, the initial source of revenue for Google. This allows other search engines to come up and play with the most controversial term, ‘Privacy.’
Recently, A Search Engine called, DuckDuckGo is in hype for claiming to be a Privacy oriented search engine with a tag line, ‘Friends Don’t Let Friends Get Tracked!‘.
The tagline speaks for itself. It is in a debate that, apart from the privacy concern, which search engine is better in terms of work performance. We’ll discuss it later, but first, let’s learn more about DuckDuckGo.
What is DuckDuckGo?
Search engine web page
The company was established in 2008 by CEO and Founder Gabriel Weinberg, who claims DuckDuckGo to be a free search engine and not a directory of your search records. It doesn’t personalize your search data and doesn’t link it to your account for target advertising.
One of Its Web page options
It has grown constantly and has reached from 16,413,461 Direct searches in 2010 to 784,217,638 in 2019. They recently announced on Twitter that they have exceeded over 9 million searches in 2018 and are on a pace to shatter the record in 2019.
It works with many famous companies like Bing ads, Amazon, Union Square Ventures, and many more.
How Does It Earn?
DuckDuckGo is an advertising-supported model in terms of revenue. Still, unlike the other search engines, it doesn’t collect data from the clicks and searches but from the keywords that people use, which helps maintain its users’ privacy.
Initially, the launch of DuckDuckGo was with its funding, but later with a different model, it attracted many investors.
‘We didn’t invest in it because we thought it would beat Google. We invested in it because there is a need for a private search engine. We did it for the Internet anarchists, people that hang out on Reddit and Hacker News.’ Fred Wilson, At the 2012 TechCrunch Disrupt Conference in New York, Fred Wilson, Union Square Ventures, said TechCrunchTechCrunch Disrupt Conference, New York.
In 2016, DuckDuckGo announced its extended partnership with Yahoo, which further led to adding some new features to the DuckDuckGo homepage. Features like
- Date filters allow you to filter results from the last day of a month.
- Site links became helpful for accessing subscription sites quickly.
The advertising model became syndicated by yahoo under the Yahoo-Microsoft search alliance.
DDG claims that it doesn’t share any of the data with any of its partner companies. It also gives the authority to the users to disable ads anytime.
Daniel Davis, the community manager of DDG, says, “People often wonder about our revenue model and how we can sustain these awesome free products. Thankfully, we’ve been profitable since 2014, predominantly from advertising based on individual search keywords rather than a personal profile or search history. So, for example, if you search for ‘car,’ we might show a car-related ad, knowing nothing about you as an individual. Since we do not collect personal information, we do not even have the concept of search histories.”
Why has DDG been in the news all along?
Recently, DDG (DuckDuckgo) has started working with Apple Maps to provide easy searches related to addresses on mobile and desktop browsers, as revealed in a blog post. ( https://spreadprivacy.com/duckduckgo-apple-mapkit-js/ )
“Our strict privacy policy of not collecting or sharing personal information extends to this integration. We do not send personally identifiable information such as IP addresses to Apple or other third parties. For local searches, where your browser sends your approximate location information to us, we discard it immediately after use,” the company stated.
Apple and DDG have always been privacy-focused for their users, so it’s not an unexpected announcement.
Apart from that, its consistent increase in the number of queries is worth noticing.
A few years back, DDG directly challenged Google by putting up a billboard in San Francisco, which directly attacked Google on its privacy methods.
Then later, Weinberg built a quick website, donttrack.us, at the suggestion of friends, which took off earlier that month, and its privacy message seemed to resonate with users. DuckDuckGo’s traffic doubled after the site got the attention of Hacker News and Stumbleupon and is now up to about 160,000 queries a day, which equates to about 5 million questions a month.
It also keeps coming up with ways to prove Google is not standing up to the expectations of people’s privacy, which gives it hype every time.
DDG CEO, Gabriel Weinberg, has been seen in the news discussing and defending his attacking Google statements and PR activities.
The concept of Donation has also given it hype.
Its website says,
“Donating for Privacy
Every year since 2011, DuckDuckGo has been donating to organizations that contribute to our vision of raising the standard of trust online.”
Their 2018 donation stats
With all these activities and certain new and eye-catching features, DDG grabbed the headlines quite often.
DuckDuckGo Vs. Google
Let’s examine a few pros and cons of using DDG over Google.
PROS:
- User privacy is the initial and the main concern that Google lacks- DDG is known for its Privacy focused model that beats Google in the endless privacy debate. It doesn’t track your searches.
- Search results using bangs- It allows commands that search through local search engines of different websites with the help of keywords with an exclamation mark. For example, if you type “Ibang” in the DDG, you can find the list of available bangs.
- The StopWatch option- Google and DDG both have the option of the timer, but DDG has come up with the stopwatch feature that makes it an instant pop-up feature is
- Instant Pop-up search or Category Pages- It has a feature of the instant pop-up search for a few selected queries like stopwatch, generate passwords, etc.
- Infinite search results scrolling- The search results are in one go with the option of more results. You don’t have to flip through pages.
- It doesn’t require JavaScript to function the search.
- Customized search results- It gives you the options to change the color, theme, language, etc. You can customize the page at your convenience
CONS:
- Only one-month-old history available- It doesn’t share your account with the third-party apps, but it doesn’t have a record of your search history for more than one month.
- Lacks date information- While scrolling the searches, the result’s publication date is unavailable. You can’t tell if the result is recent or outdated.
- Less number of images and search results -It doesn’t get you the results you are willing to have that consume more time and energy. It sure is customizable and fun to use, but in the end, what you need is results
- No Location-based results: The local location specifications can’t be shown since it is not tracking you.
- No Personalized search: No tracking leads to no personalized searches.
- Too many owners: It depends totally upon the ad revenue. Its income source is Bing ads and combined revenue from Amazon and eBay. The company has several investors too.
- Shares Server with Amazon.
Sources:
Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuckDuckGo#cite_note-Ludwig1-42
Twitter: https://twitter.com/DuckDuckGo?lang=en
DuckDuckGo Website: https://duckduckgo.com/spread
Quora
DuckDuckGo Instant Answers: https://duck.co/ia
Forbes
Kailasha Foundation – Bringing Solutions To You
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