Why Should I Use DuckDuckGo Instead of Google?

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Why Should I Use DuckDuckGo

Instead of Google?
FILED UNDER DUCKDUCKGO Q&A

#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.

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In fact, it’s a myth that you need to track people to make money in web
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knowing anything about you. That’s how we make money and it doesn't
involve tracking because it is based on the keyword and not the person.
Google could do this too; they just chose not to— all that tracking is to
power their ad networks so that ads can follow you around the Internet
using your search history and other information they have on you.

So-called incognito mode won’t protect you either. That’s another 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. Here’s the fine print:

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

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personally, or even tie them together into a search history that could
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#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,

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with Google running three of the largest non-search ad networks

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DoubleClick.

You know those ads that creepily follow you around everywhere? Most
of those are actually run through these Google ad networks, where they
let advertisers target you against your search history, browsing history,
location history and other personal information they collect. Even less
well known is they also enable advertisers like airlines to charge you
different prices based upon your personal information.

These ads are not only annoying — they are literally designed to
manipulate you through targeting to make you buy more things, and
just showing them to you is an act of Google profiting off of your
personal information.

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

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localization. They want local weather and restaurants, which can

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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.

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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 in Google.
And these tactics are not just on the search engine.

On Android on many implementations there is immovable Google

search widget and you can’t even change its search engine if you want
to. By just installing it by default, this behavior is a direct analogue to

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Microsoft putting IE on Windows in the 1990s, but worse since it takes

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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 !q for Quora, !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.

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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, most of the entire first page is ads. On
mobile it can be even worse.

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Not so on DuckDuckGo. We keep ads to a minimum, and naturally

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personal profile or search history. In fact, as stated above, it’s a myth

that you need to track people to make money in web search. When you
search ‘car’ we can show you a car ad without knowing anything about
you, based on the keywords you type in.

#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.

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By comparison, DuckDuckGo is tiny. We’re currently a team of about

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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!

For more privacy advice, follow us on Twitter & get our privacy crash
course.

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