DuckDuckGo search engine

[miriam_e]

I've become increasingly annoyed with Google's search. Recently I found out about DuckDuckGo which is in many ways far better. Without all the privacy-breaching claptrap now added to Google, DuckDuckGo seem to be able to get search results to you more quickly.

The search results from DuckDuckGo actually give you the address of the page you're looking for, whereas Google forces you through their system with a fake address that gets info about your search (and yourself) and then gives you the requested page.

DuckDuckGo don't filter your results according to what they think you'll want based on past searches -- each search is new and fresh. Google make it very easy to begin living in a bubble where it becomes increasingly difficult to find new and challenging things because they learn what you want and present you with more of the same.

DuckDuckGo don't track you. Google do. In fact Google appear to have a nice cosy relationship with NSA, which a bit worrying, considering the accidental targeting of innocent people that is becoming a side-effect of computerised tracking and eavesdropping. This is not to mention potential harrassment of people involved in legitimate, non-violent protest, or those perhaps belonging to parts of the population disliked by those who control the status quo.

So don't google things; duckduckgo them... doesn't have quite the same ring to it, I know. I wish they'd chosen a simpler name.

DukGo is their community page.

Comments

[greylock]

I've been using it for about 18 months or so.
Never had any cause to complain.

I've heard a few anti-DDG articles (this was the most recent: http://search.slashdot.org/story/13/07/14/0046257/duckduckgo-illusion-of-privacy), but nothing that concerns me too much. Like that, they seem to be flash-in-the-pan blogs. But you might be interested.

[miriam_e]

Thank you. I really appreciate the link. I should read geek conversations more often. There I learned about a lot of interesting things:

• ixquick (or same thing with a more memorable name: StartPage), which redirects your search through Google, but stripping off all identifiers. The results do still send you through Google though, which opens the potential for tracking still, and certainly slows you down, which is annoying.
  
• Yandex, a Russian search engine, similar in capabilities to Google. As someone there noted, it means the Russians will be tracking you, but US or Russia; they both invade bystander countries, bomb their population, and imprison dissidents.
  
• DailyMotion is another alternative to YouTube.
  
• keywords in bookmarks let me search more easily. Using a Mozilla web browser (like Firefox or Seamonkey) if I bookmark http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search/%s and then edit the bookmark to add the keyword wiki, then next time I want to search for, say nanotechnology on wikipedia, I can type into the address bar wiki nanotechnology and the browser will suggest http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search/nanotechnology on the line below. Try it and you'll see what I mean -- I didn't quite get it til I did it.
  
• Ctrl L jumps straight to the address bar and selects its contents, ready for me to type in something.

Oh, and regarding DuckDuckGo being safe from spooks, I figure nothing is, but Google deserve to lose customers for rolling over so easily. Also I much prefer the speed of access of pages on DuckDuckGo because search result links take you straight to the target page instead of through Google a second time. And I like that there might be less bubble effect with DuckDuckGo, though that would also be true of ixquick.

I would still like to find a way to search for information that isn't spied upon, because a while ago I wanted to write a story in which a deluded bad guy was making pipe bombs. I probably could have worked out how that could be done (I have thousands of books), but I've never really been terribly interested in explosives so my knowledge in that area is a little lacking. My first impulse was to do a search, but before I typed anything in it hit me that it would look very suspicious to spooks (this was before the NSA scandal, but I had plenty of reason to believe Eschelon was real) and I didn't want one day to have it come back and bite me unexpectedly (anybody can be made to look like a criminal these days, regardless of how honest you are). In the end I gave up on writing the story, less because of the difficulty of finding out about such craziness, more because violence doesn't interest me enough. That said, my next story looks like it will feature some deluded and violent people. I've been mapping out the story for the last couple of years and it will be about the dangers of out-of-control spooks. When the NSA spying scandal broke I thought, wow, suddenly it is topical. I have to say I'm still a little reluctant though... writing about horrid people is not as much fun as writing about good people.