Mr. Conservative – by Warner Todd Huston
Sick of ads bombarding you when you go to Google, Bing or other search engines? Well, there is a search engine that helps you forget about that noise and its hit rate has soared since it was revealed that the NSA has been snooping on everyone’s communications.
The search engine is a little known site called DuckDuckGo.com and its traffic has doubled recently and for good reason, no ads and no user data sharing.
In a two week period, the DailyMail reports, DuckDuckGo’s traffic went from 1.7 million users a day to over 3 million.
Gabriel Weinberg, founder and CEO of the search engine, told British newspapers that, “We started seeing an increase right when the story broke, before we were covered in the press.”
Weinberg says that he had the idea to create a better search engine when he noticed that Google’s results were terribly skewed towards advertiser’s content.
The website maven described how search engines work and revealed the “search leakage” that happens when you use Google or Bing or other search engines.
‘For example, when you search for something private, you are sharing that private search not only with your search engine, but also with all the sites that you clicked on (for that search),’ he points out on his website.
‘In addition, when you visit any site, your computer automatically sends information about it to that site (including your User agent and IP address). This information can often be used to identify you directly.
‘So when you do that private search, not only can those other sites know your search terms, but they can also know that you searched it. It is this combination of available information about you that raises privacy concerns,’ he says.
Weinberg notes that his search engine does none of those things. Your search is only of your concern and no one else will ever know what you’ve been looking for if you use his service.
Of course 3 million users is a far cry from the billions that Google gets, but, hey, you have to start somewhere, right?
So, if you want to avoid having the searches you perform in a search engine ending up as fodder for advertising or, worse, a line in the National Security Agency data base, check out DuckDuckGo.com, won’t you?
Iv tried them. Not all that great imo.
I like startpage better but I still have to use google for the hard to find things. I do a lot of parts tracking for my business. Id never use it on my personal computer though.