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DuckDuckGo is the fourth-largest search engine in the U.S. with 1.61 percent of market share, making it David vs. Goliath Google, which occupies 87.6 percent of the market.
After Google, Bing owns the No. two spot with a 7.02 percent share, Yahoo! is No. three with a 3.38 percent share and Ecosia (0.12 percent).
Unlike Google, which is bogged down in privacy concerns, the DuckDuckGo search engine is all about privacy. Google is known for harvesting, tracking, storing and monitoring user data.
If these and targeted advertising make you sick, DuckDuckGo is an alternative. Here are five reasons to dump commercially perverted Google Search for DuckDuckGo.
James Temperton from Wired used DuckDuckGo for two years and wrote about the experience, saying it sold him “on a post-Google future”.
DuckDuckGo works much the same way as any other search engine. It combines data from hundreds of sources including Wikipedia, Bing and Wolfram Alpha, with its own web crawler, to give you the most relevant results, Temperton wrote. Google does exactly the same thing on a larger scale.
The key difference, he said, is that DuckDuckGo does not store IP addresses or user information and it doesn’t track you.
DuckDuckGo has 78 employees and Google has 114,096, “but often the outcome is the same,” Temperton wrote. “For the majority of your searches, David, it turns out, is just as good as Goliath.”
An independent search engine designed from A to Z to with your privacy in mind, DuckDuckGo doesn’t collect information about you, doesn’t collect your search queries and doesn’t install cookies or tracking code on your systems.
It also provides accurate maps thanks to a deal with Apple that lets it use the private-by-design Apple Maps service, wrote Jonny Evans with Computerworld. DuckDuckGo is using Apple’s MapKit JS framework, which Apple created so website owners could embed maps in their sites.
A 2019 Wall Street Journal investigation found that Google manipulated search algorithms to prioritize big businesses over smaller ones, removing autocomplete results that involve sensitive topics such as immigration and abortion, and even blacklisted some websites outright.
Guiding users to more prominent businesses over lesser-known ones reportedly helped boost Amazon’s store in search results. Autocomplete search results for sensitive subjects were replaced with safer results than those found on competing search engines like DuckDuckGo, Yahoo and Bing, Business Insider reported.
Google has increasingly re-engineered and interfered with search results, the Journal found — often in response to pressure from businesses, outside interest groups and governments around the world.
“They have increased sharply since the 2016 election and the rise of online misinformation … Google’s evolving approach marks a shift from its founding philosophy of ‘organizing the world’s information’ to one that is far more active in deciding how that information should appear.”
Billed as the search engine that doesn’t track you, DuckDuckGo processes around 1.5 billion searches a month, Wired reported. By contrast, Google processes around 3.5 billion searches per day — hardly a fair fight, but DuckDuckGo is growing. In 2012, it averaged 45 million searches per month. “The actual difference in the results you see when you search isn’t so far apart,” Temperton reported.
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“In fact, in many respects, DuckDuckGo is better. Its search results aren’t littered with Google products and services – boxes and carousels to try and persuade people to spend more time in Google’s family of apps.”
Buying search engine DuckDuckGo and making it the default search engine on iOS and Mac Apple could cost Google about $15 billion a year, Forbes reported.
“Apple has always loved vertical integration: owning the full solution stack for customers,” according to Forbes.
There are some potential benefits for Apple to buy DuckDuckGo. Both are very privacy-focused. Google, by comparison, is constantly targeted in privacy lawsuits and legal actions. In the U.S., Google is facing a $5 billion class-action lawsuit for allegedly illegally invading the privacy of millions of users by tracking their internet use through browsers set in “private” mode.
