#1 —
Google tracks you. We don’t.
You
share your most intimate secrets with your search engine without even thinking:
medical, financial and personal issues, along with all the day to day things
that make you, well, you. All of that personal information should be private,
but on Google it’s not. On Google, your searches are tracked, mined, and
packaged up into a data profile for advertisers to follow you around the
Internet through those intrusive and annoying ever-present banner ads, using
Google’s massive ad networks, embedded across millions of sites and apps.
So-called
incognito mode won’t protect you either. That’s a myth. “Incognito” mode isn’t
really incognito at all. It’s an extremely misleading name and in my opinion
should be changed. All it does is delete your local browsing history after your
session on your device, but does nothing from stopping any website you visit,
including Google, from tracking you via your IP address and other tracking
mechanisms like browser fingerprinting.
To keep
your searches private and out of data profiles, the government, and other legal requests, you need to use DuckDuckGo.
We don’t track you at all, regardless what browsing mode you are in.
Each
time you search on DuckDuckGo, it’s as if you’ve never been there before. We
simply don’t store anything that can tie your searches to you personally, or
even tie them together into a search history that could later be tied back to you. For more details, check
out our privacy policy.
#2 —
Block Google trackers lurking everywhere.
Google
tracks you on more than just their search engine.
You may realize they also track you on YouTube, Gmail, Chrome, Android, Gmaps,
and all the other services they run. For those, we recommend using private alternatives like
DuckDuckGo for search. Yes, you can live Google-free. I’ve been doing it for
many years.
What
you may not realize, though, is Google trackers are actually lurking behind the
scenes on 75% of the top million websites.
To give you a sense of how large that is, Facebook is the next closest with
25%. It’s a good bet that any random site you land on the
Internet will have a Google tracker hiding on it. Between the two of them, they
are truly dominating online advertising,
by some measures literally making up 74%+ of all its growth.
A key component of how they have managed to do that is through all these hidden
trackers.
Google
Analytics is installed on most sites, tracking you behind the scenes, letting
website owners know who is visiting their sites, but also feeding that
information back to Google. Same for the ads themselves, with Google running
three of the largest non-search ad networks installed on millions of sites and
apps: Adsense, Admob, and DoubleClick.
At
DuckDuckGo, we’ve expanded beyond our roots in search, to protect you no matter
where you go on the Internet. Our DuckDuckGo browser extension and
mobile app is available for all major browsers and devices, and
blocks these Google trackers, along with the ones from Facebook and countless
other data brokers. It does even more to protect you as well like providing
smarter encryption.
#3 —
Get unbiased results, outside the Filter Bubble.
When
you search, you expect unbiased results, but that’s not what you get on Google.
On Google, you get results tailored to what they think you’re
likely to click on, based on the data profile they’ve built on you over time
from all that tracking I described above.
That
may appear at first blush to be a good thing, but when most people say they
want personalization in a search context they actually want localization. They
want local weather and restaurants, which can actually be provided without
tracking, like we do at DuckDuckGo. That’s because approximate location info is
automatically embedded by your computer in the search request, which we can use
to serve you local results and immediately throw away without tracking you.
Beyond
localization, personalized results are dangerous because to show you results
they think you’ll click on, they must filter results they
think you’ll skip. That’s why it’s called the Filter Bubble.
So if
you have political leanings one way or another, you’re more likely to get results you
already agree with, and less likely to ever see opposing viewpoints.
In the aggregate this leads to increased echo chambers that are significantly
contributing to our increasingly polarized society.
This
Filter Bubble is especially pernicious in a search context because you have the
expectation that you’re seeing what others are seeing, that you’re seeing the
“results.” We’ve done studies over the years where we have people search for
the same topics on Google at the same time and in “Incognito” mode, and
found they are significantly tailored.
On
DuckDuckGo, we are committed to not putting you in the Filter Bubble. We don’t
even force people into a local country index unless they explicitly opt-in.
#4 — We
listen.
Google
is notoriously hard to get a hold of. Locked out of your Gmail account?
Sorry, we can’t help you. The Knowledge Graph says you’re
dead? That’s unfortunate. Unless you’re a journalist or influencer
of some kind, good luck getting anyone at Google to listen.
Meanwhile
at DuckDuckGo we read every piece of feedback we get. We respond on
social media. In short, we listen. My
DMs are open and I read all the email sent to me personally.
Feel free to reach out.
#5 — We
don’t try to trap you in our “ecosystem.”
It used
to be that you search on Google and then you click off to the top result. Over
time, Google bought more and more companies and
launched more and more of their own competing services, favoring them over
others in their search results. Google Places instead of Yelp, TripAdvisor,
etc. Google Products instead of Amazon, Target, etc. They’re in travel, health,
and soon jobs. Anywhere
there is money to be made, you can expect them to get into it eventually.
Even
when you do click off, Google AMP tries to still trap you you in
Google. And these tactics are not just on the search engine.
On
Android there is immovable Google search widget and you can’t even change its
search engine if you want to. This behavior is a direct analogue to Microsoft putting IE on Windows in
the 1990s, but worse since you can’t remove it, can’t replace it,
and it takes up more of the smaller screen. The same is true for other Google services on Android as
well, forcing carriers to bundle and promote them. We personally have similar
issues with Chrome search engine integration.
At
DuckDuckGo, we aren’t trying to take over the world. We don’t have an
“ecosystem” to trap you in. We just want to help you get to where you want to
go as fast as possible, and protect you as much as we can in that process.
#6 — We
have !bangs.
To
further this point, we have a built-in feature called bangs that
enables you to search other sites directly, completely skipping DuckDuckGo if
you like. Here’s how it works. Let’s say you know you want to go to the
Wikipedia article for ducks. You can just search for “!w duck” and we will take
you right there.
The !
tells DuckDuckGo you want to use a bang shortcut, and the w is an abbreviation
for Wikipedia. You can use the full name, though we have a lot of shortcuts
such as !a for Amazon, !r for Reddit, etc. There are literally thousands of
sites that this feature works with, and so most sites you think of will
probably work. It also works with our autocomplete so you can see what’s there
easily.
If you
routinely search a particular site, like Stack Overflow for coding answers or
Baseball Reference for stats or All Recipes for something to make, you can just
go right there.
If
DuckDuckGo is your default search engine, you can just type this right into
your browser's address bar, and skip loading our search engine altogether. We
will just route you to the right place, without tracking you of course!
#7 — We
strive for a world where you have control over your personal information.
Our
vision is to raise the standard of trust online. If you share this vision,
supporting DuckDuckGo helps us make progress towards it. For the past seven
years, we’ve been donating a substantial portion
of our profits to organizations that also work towards the Internet we want —
an open Internet where you can take control of your personal information.
We
believe that privacy policies shouldn’t be default “collect it all," but
instead offer a clear and compelling case as to what benefits you get by giving
up your personal information. If you share this view for
the future of data privacy, you can vote with your feet.
#8 —
Our search results aren’t loaded up with ads.
For
many Google searches, the entire first page is ads. On mobile it can be even
worse, multiple pages of ads. Not so on DuckDuckGo. We keep ads to a minimum,
and naturally they're non-tracking ads, based only on search keywords and not
on a personal profile or search history.
#9 —
Search without fear.
When
people know they are being watched, they change their behavior. It's a
well-documented behavior called the chilling effect, and it happens on Google.
For example, an MIT study showed that
people started doing fewer health searches on Google after the Snowden
revelations, fearing that their personal ailments might get out.
“Suppressing
health information searches potentially harms the health of search engine users
and… In general, our results suggest that there is a chilling effect on search
behavior from government surveillance on the Internet.”
Your
searches are your business, and you should feel free to search whatever you
want, whenever you want. You can easily escape this chilling effect on
DuckDuckGo where you are anonymous.
#10 —
Google is simply too big, and too powerful.
Google
is GIANT, the epitome of Silicon Valley big tech, with a market cap of around 750 Billion dollars
(at the time of writing), 75,000 employees,
dominating search, browsing, online advertising, and more, with tentacles in
everything tech, online and offline. Last year they outspent every other company on
lobbying Washington.
By
comparison, DuckDuckGo is tiny. We’re currently a team of about 45 people,
scattered across the globe; I’m in Pennsylvania. We have a very narrow focus:
helping you take control of your personal information online.
The
world could use more competition, less focus on ad tracking, fewer eggs in one
basket.
Join
the Duck Side!
Content By : https://www.quora.com/profile/Gabriel-Weinberg