Tuesday, September 18, 2012

Duck Duck Go: The Private Search Engine

Duck Duck Go is a search engine like Google and Bing (how I hate that name...), but there's something odd about it, something different. If you and a friend were to search anything (say, the Radiohead tour dates) on Google and Bing, the two of you will most likely get different results. Not too different, but certainly not the same. Even more, if you look at the URLs for the two links above, you can probably tell certain things about me. For example, the Google link shows that I use the Ubuntu operating system. They say more, but I don't want to get too far down the rabbit hole.
So, why are they different? Two main reasons: tracking and filtering. Both browsers track you, and both filter results to what they think you want. You may think that you're getting unbiased results, but you're actually getting your own bias, which  limits what you're exposed to. That's not great.
The tracking might be worse. Remember how the URL has information about you in it? It has information about your browser and your computer, a lot of information. To find out exactly what information is sent, go to this link at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

So what exactly can you do about it? Duck Duck Go is a (pretty popular) search engine that doesn't track and doesn't filter. If you search for Radiohead tour dates on DDG, you can see that their link doesn't have any of that tracking information, and they don't send any additional info to websites. You can find them at DuckDuckGo.com

Related:
Oldie but Goodie
Google Stopped Sending Out Tracking Info (but not really)
Edit: Switched to the INFO 3.0 blog, not my own.

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