A few days ago, my sempai Ruben wrote up this little blog post about DuckDuckGo and it got me wondering wether I should give it another go.
DuckDuckGo is an internet search engine similar to Google or Bing, but has one feature that all the others lack – privacy. With Google, Yahoo, Bing and pretty much all the other big name search engines, you get no privacy… at all. Everything you search is saved in some form to either be used for marketing, add targeting, search predictions, etc. But ultimately these companies called data about you, and then sell this data (sell you) to advertisers. Thats how they make money, thats their business model. With DDG, thats not the case, they don’t track you (well at least they say the don’t). But thats not the only good factors about DDG. The site has customisation options, a region switch, ! lookup operators, and other neat features, which I never knew I wanted, but am used to now.
Back when Apple released OSX10.10 Yosemite and iOS8, they added an option to make DuckDuckGo the default search engine in Safari. Thats when I tried it for the first time. It was a good experience I might say, but ultimately I ended up going back to Google as my primary search engine, when DDG failed to find results for relatively simple searches.
Now though after a good year, I think I will give it another shot. I have moved everything of my Gmail, I have pretty much cleared my Google+ and the only things left in GDrive is collaboration folders for uni group work. I am not quite sure wether I am ready to give up Google Search, but I will definitely give DDG a go for the next few weeks, and if it grows on me, I’ll stick to it.
Of course I don’t recommend that you all go out there and change your search engines to DDG and change your habits, but as an innovative and forward thinking person as I believe myself to be, I will seek the new solutions to the problems that we have been facing for years; the alternatives to established concepts; I will rebel against the norm and embrace that which is new and (arguably) superior. Long live the startups, long live the community.
