DuckDuckGo: don't get your Google searches passed around

[thewayne]

There's an old saying: if you're not paying for an online service, then YOU are the product being sold. In the case of Google, their primary revenue stream is from selling ads. Companies buy tracking information about everyone who does Google searches, which includes geo-code information that is surprisingly easy to track back to you. If you'd like to see how this is done, take a look here: http://donttrack.us/

If you use Gmail, you're doubley-tracked. Basically any service from Google that you are signed in to that ultimately ties to a Gmail account, like Google+, YouTube, Blogger, will directly tie your search information directly to your email account.

You can avoid this with DuckDuckGo. It's a search engine that delivers high quality results, can easily search in to web sites like Amazon or Ebay, and doesn't store information that can be tracked back to you. Google is routinely served with subpoenas for user information which they must comply with, DuckDuckGo doesn't save anything that can be surrendered to a subpoena. And it does smarter results: let's say you're searching for Mike Ditka, the first returned result will be a Wikipedia summary that might answer your question without clicking further.

And in Firefox and Chrome, I don't know about Safari yet (and if you're using Internet Explorer: why?), you can easily make it your default search engine.

https://duckduckgo.com/

Comments

[silveradept]

And that's without mentioning the bang searches, where you can use a ! with a website or idea (!images) and it will search that website, (including Googlethings) using an https connection. And that it can do calculations and other neat things if you just type them in (because it hooks into Wolfram|Alpha) and...and...and...

Yeah, once introduced, I was sold on DDG.

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

Well, I didn't specifically mention bang searches, but I did talk about directly searching ebay and such. I liked being able to directly integrate it with Firefox, Epic also supports it. Sadly, Safari does not, you have your choice of Google, Yahoo, and Bing.

And I have all three browsers open all the time. Epic is used exclusively for my Pampered Chef stuff: it has Gmail, Facebook, and Pampered Chef and that's all that's done there so there's (as far as I know) no way for Google or Facebook to watch what other things that I do online.

Yeah, it's an awesome search engine.

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

I did find that DDG is not as good as Google for looking up phone numbers. Because of the WA link, you enter 111-222-3333 and it computes it. You can put it in quotes, but I find it best to just do it through Google. We get a lot of scammers/telemarketers on my wife's cell, though not on mine, and sometimes I need to confirm it's a scam so I do this a lot.

[silveradept]

Ah. Well, it used to be that everyone had their preference of search engine for various tasks, so maybe there's still a vestige of that in this regard.