DuckDuckGo vs. Google

Despite efforts by others, it's come down to two search engines vying for everyone's attention: Google and DuckDuckGo. Even with Microsoft making a valiant effort, you just don't hear people saying "Bing it." At all.

Despite its incredible success, Google is far from the only search engine in town. Depending on your needs and priorities, Google may not even be the best search engine. DuckDuckGo has been rapidly gaining users thanks to its privacy focus, especially in contrast to Google's omnipresent all-seeing eyes.

For many of us, Google is the slightly unpleasant co-worker we put up with because they're really good at its job. The degree to which Google tracks you is as astonishing as it is endemic to the use of their services. It saves and tracks search results, of course, but it also tracks so much more: current location, webpage analytics, web browsing history, and more beyond. Google is likely the largest tracker of human behavior in recorded history.

There are, however, some benefits to the panopticon. Google's all-seeing eye helps make their search and other services more effective, and keeps them all free. Google's searches are unquestionably top notch. The search engine has an undeniable intuition for what you actually meant to search for. It's able to decode a muddled string of misspelled search terms and, somehow, return exactly what you were hoping for. That's what all their tracking makes possible: the fastest and most accurate search results. But it's not the only game in town.

DuckDuckGo has been at the privacy game for years. DuckDuckGo's claim to fame is that it tracks (nearly) nothing about you. It does not attach your searches to any persistent identifier in order to build a picture of your likes and dislikes. No cookies are set by default. When they are set, it's to track user-implemented settings, and there is no method for identifying unique users. Of course, a modern search engine can't function without examining whether or not users clicked on links for a given search term. That's why search data is only collected in aggregate. No personal information, like IP addresses, UUIDs, or user agent strings, is ever attached to the results.

It's not just the privacy angle, though. DuckDuckGo's "bangs" are the search engine's best feature. Named after the exclamation point that proceeds them, bangs are text strings that redirect your search terms to a specific website's internal search. Let's say that you know you want to look for a movie on IMDb: type the !imdb bang, then the movie name you're searching for. The query will be sent to IMDb, redirecting you directly to the results page on imdb.com.