Google has emerged as one of the biggest companies over the world offering a wide range of products and services. Although to keep those services free, Google records data about you and uses it to display advertising – their main source of income.
As the debate around online privacy ramping up France being the first to fine Google over GDPR laws, many people are looking for an alternative. Is DuckDuckGo the privacy-focused search engine you’ve been looking for?
DuckDuckGo doesn’t share or collect personal information. There is no search history or profile or anything else stored, shared, sold to the third-parties.
It does not “bubble” your search terms. Other search engines will show you different search results for two users using the same search terms – filtered on the basis of your search history and other aspects.
Unlike other search engines, the adverts on DuckDuckGo are not based on targeted data, but exclusively on the keywords on your search. More importantly, they have privacy setting from which you can disable advertisements.
DuckDuckGo has a lot many features even more than other search engines. You can use DuckDuckGo to shorten a URL, calculate a tip, generate a random and strong password etc.
Most importantly they have a clear, explicit privacy policy- clearly stating that they “do not store IP addresses or unique User agent strings and will set a cookie only for storing site settings”.
Plus, it also ends the policy with this assuring statement –
“…we will comply with court-ordered legal requests. However, in our case, we don’t expect any because there is nothing useful to give them since we don’t collect any personal information.”