DuckDuckGo. Not your everyday quack!
Before diving into this subject, I’ll provide a quick outline of what DDG is:
DuckDuckGo (DDG) is an Internet search engine that emphasizes protecting searchers' privacy while avoiding the filter bubble of personalized search results. DuckDuckGo distinguishes itself from other search engines by not profiling its users and deliberately showing all users the same search results for a given search term. DuckDuckGo focuses on returning the best results, rather than the most results. Courtesy of Wikipedia.
What makes this duck so special anyway? Two words, Value and Privacy.
Value:
DuckDuckGo strives to provide value in the search results, part of that meaning less ads and spam articles. They even filter websites with excessive advertising. And to aid in proving their mission, they offer the option to turn ads off completely from the search results, representing a company less focused on money, and more focused on providing a quality experience as you peruse the web.
Privacy browsing:
Privacy is a vast issue as the internet continues to evolve. Unlike Google, DuckDuckGo positions itself as a search engine that puts privacy first and as such it does not store IP addresses (the numerical label assigned to your device), does not log user information and uses cookies only when needed. Founder of DDG Gabriel Weinberg states "By default, DuckDuckGo does not collect or share personal information. That is our privacy policy in a nutshell."
Why is privacy browsing so important, and why should you care at all? Continue reading for ‘The Google Problem’.
DuckDuckGo offers other neat features as well:
- Because favicons (the small images that show up in address bar, unique to each site) are displayed next to search results for instant recognition of your favorite sites.
- The results pages aren’t paginated, which makes it easy to scroll down and find what you're looking for quickly.
- Quick word definitions.
- Get an instant weather report.
- Conversions. (Such as miles to kilometers for example).
- Local Attractions.
- Etc.
My Personal Experience.
When I first started using DuckDuckGo, I was skeptical, but surprised to find it very easy to use, fast and effective. The format is very similar to that of Google, but of course, it doesn’t operate in the same way Google does. While browsing, the results seemed to be more relevant and specific to what I was searching for, with fewer ads, which I noticed right of the bat. Plus, the duck logo gives off pleasant vibes!
The Google Problem. Underlying facts of the search giant.
Maybe you’re not quite convinced or worried about your privacy being such a big deal on the web. I mean, what’s the matter with my Google searches anyway? Surely there’s nothing to be concerned about! Wrong. Let me explain.
Google tracks everything about you, where you live and go, interests, habits/patterns, your personal emails, etc and etc! They tailor your search results based on what they know about you, manipulating what you see and click based on their company interests.
Realizing that Google catches every single thing you do online if you’re using a Google-based feature (such as search, maps, gmail, or what have you), that data is being used to build powerful personality profiles. As Gawker reported:
"Every word of every email sent through Gmail and every click made on a Chrome browser is watched by the company. 'We don't need you to type at all,' [Google co-founder Eric] Schmidt once said. 'We know where you are. We know where you've been. We can more or less know what you're thinking about.'"
From the mouth of the co-founder himself.
All this info Google gathers about you is said to be used for targeted advertising, this is true, and is bad enough on the account they make big money selling your personal data. However, that’s not nearly the full scope of what’s really going on, now we’ll dig a little deeper into the underlying world of Google.
Artificial Intelligence (AI). The machine powering the machine.
What is artificial intelligence? Here’s a simple definition: Artificial intelligence is intelligence carried out by machines, contrasting natural intelligence carried out by humans. AI research is defined as the study of “artificial agents”, which is any device that perceives its environment and takes actions to enhance and maximize its chance of successfully achieving a given goal.
Google is the world’s top AI company, after purchasing Deep Mind for $500 million, deep mind now employs over 700 AI researchers. This deep level of AI enables them to defeat a human chess champion for example. A machine beating a highly trained human champion? The ability of these complex learning algorithms makes it easy to compile and sort through your data and patterns to exploit them, odds are, that’s already happening to you. Googles military connections make their data harvesting concerning, that of course is only the surface of how they apply your info to their various interests. This is primary to Googles business.
By offering various services, Google is distracting from the privacy violations commonly taking place, as the company has been repeatably caught infringing on privacy rights and misrepresenting the amount and nature of the data it collects from its users on a daily basis.
The point is clear, it’s not just targeted advertising to which Googles puts your personal data to work, there are numerous applications inside of their AI business. And this is just the tip of the iceberg folks!
Google does provide some nice services, with search being the most important. But I don’t love the motives, morals, or ethics behind it. If you would like to learn more about this subject, give me a shout out in the comments section, and I’ll look into writing another article solely on the Google problems.
Conclusion.
In conclusion, I’ll sum up the overall message.
At the end of the day, it’s your choice where you choose to peruse the internet. I choose to switch to DuckDuckGo because I didn’t feel congenial about my privacy being exploited on Google, and when ads were concerned, though they never bothered me immensely, they were annoying at times.
What I received from my switch to DuckDuckGo.com was safer browsing, more valuable and focused results in relation to a given search, amply less ads (I could even turn ads off completely), and the satisfaction of supporting excellent morals, ethics, and a noble cause. Sound nice?
Could DDG become the next Google? Hard to say, and explicitly hard to do. However, the duck is continually growing, servicing over 5 billion search queries in 2017, with a company lifetime total of approximately 17 billion at the time of this writing. So yes, it’s not reached the scale of Google by a long shot, though the numbers are still considerable. Who can say in the next ten to thirty years?
Ultimately, after reading this post, you can ask yourself an important question. Do you feel comfortable, private/safe, and able to retain a good conscience when searching Google? If not, and you want to #ComeToTheDuckSide, go try it out! (By the way, this article probably won’t rank high on the Google search, if you know what I mean.:)
Thank you very much Steemians for taking the time to read this post. I hope it was of some value to you!
j-james