What Is DuckDuckGo? Google Alternative for 2021
DuckDuckGo is the best privacy-focused search engine that doesn’t track you. The Alternative to Google, Bing, and Yahoo are overgrowing. Here’s an introduction to DuckDuckGo and a looks at how it defends your privacy.
What Is DuckDuckGo?
DuckDuckGo is a search engine converged on privacy. To utilize it, you head to duckduckgo.com instead of google.com or bing.com. Next, you search just like you usually would. However, DuckDuckGo agrees to protect your privacy and not track you—we’ll describe what that means in more extra detail.
You can also get DuckDuckGo, your default search engine in browsers like Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Edge. Whenever you search your browser’s location bar or current tab page, you’ll be used to DuckDuckGo instead of Google. DuckDuckGo is made into new web browsers as one of the default options, and switching takes several clicks or taps.
DuckDuckGo seems much like Google. It can search websites, videos, news articles, images, and shopping web pages. It has built-in maps, including navigation powered by Apple Maps. This has dictionary results, Wikipedia integration, and another immediate answer, really like Google does.
Of course, DuckDuckGo doesn’t allow the same search results that Google does. DuckDuckGo’s results will be various.
How Does DuckDuckGo Protect Your Privacy?
Google has an accounting system, including a history of your searches on Google is stored in your Google Activity on default. Google more uses your activity to customize your search results, delivering more personalized, relevant search results. When you’re not signed in, Google remembers your search history and matches it to a browser cookie.
Of course, Google also tracks you across another website through Google Analytics, tracks the YouTube videos you watch, remembers about your progress through Google Maps, and so on. Google tracks plenty of data that it utilizes to customize your experience—and show you personalized advertisements. Much of this data feeds into Google AdSense, which offers you customized advertisements on many websites you visit. (You can see much of this Google account activity data and delete it.)
DuckDuckGo does not remember your search history. According to DuckDuckGo, the company doesn’t also log the IP address associated with a search in its server logs. There’s not such information as a DuckDuckGo account and doesn’t tie search history to a personalized cookie. Read this privacy policy for more details.
Because this doesn’t track any information about you, also doesn’t help you customized search results based on your browsing. There’s never a “filter bubble” showing you different search results from different people observing in different words.
How Does DuckDuckGo Work?
According to the Help Pages, makes its results of up to 400 sources. For example, any “Instant Answer” results come from Wikipedia.
While DuckDuckGo’s documentation puts it: “We more, of course, have more traditional links in the search results, which we also source from many partners, though most commonly from Bing (and none from Google).”
This isn’t just Bing—it’s more than that—yet much of the website’s search results are sourced from Bing’s website-crawling data. Says that it never shares private data with any of its partners. If you search on DuckDuckGo, DuckDuckGo’s servers talk to Bing (and its other partners), and those partners don’t view your IP address or know anything about you. They can’t track individuals.
How Does DuckDuckGo Make Money?
DuckDuckGo is free. Then how does it make money? Comfortable—through advertising.
Those ads aren’t personalized at all. They’re just connected with different searches. So, if you search “lawn mower,” you will notice ads for lawn mowers in the search results. Later, if you search “dishwasher,” you’ll see ads for dishwashers.
You won’t keep ‘lawn mower’ advertisements following you nearby if you won’t wake up the next day and notice ads for combination lawn mower plus dishwasher bundles in your particular area. Doesn’t even remember what you recently searched for.
It turns out that showing ads only based on search results pays the bills. Also, for many results, has even some advertisements than Google itself.
Who Owns DuckDuckGo, and Is It Safe?
DuckDuckGo is managed by a company named DuckDuckGo, Inc. This company is based out of Paoli, Pennsylvania. Also, it has 124 employees around the world as of January 2021.
The search engine was launched in 2008, higher than a decade ago. Since then, DuckDuckGo’s traffic continues to rise to new heights. As of January 19, 2021, over 102 million searches are being performed every day.
Is as secure as a search engine can be, and it’s legit—it isn’t some new, fly-by-night company. It’s one of the several search engines given as an option by default in all major web browsers and is generally trusted.
Is DuckDuckGo Good, Compared to Google?
DuckDuckGo isn’t like Google—as its documentation points out, many of the web results come from Bing.
Whether is an excellent replacement for Google depends on what you’re searching for and where you live. If you’re involved in switching, there’s only one way to find out: Try utilizing, and notice how it goes. Turn your default search engine too and understand if you’re happy with the results.
Keep in mind that the results won’t be personalized to you based on your history. Google does a bunch of personalization based on your past activity, and you might have to be a little more special in your searches to find exactly what you’re watching for.
Try DuckDuckGo Today
However, since early 2021, DuckDuckGo’s results are better than ever. If you’d like to keep your searches private, go away from services owned by large tech companies, and avoid hyper-personalized advertisements also search results, DuckDuckGo is the search engine you should try.
