Duckduckgo
https://duckduckgo.com
With only a 0.85 per cent share of the UK search-engine market, Duckduckgo lags way behind Google and Bing in popularity, but it’s the best way to search the web anonymously. It doesn’t share details of your searches, collect personal data that can be used to identify you or tailor your search results to favour pages it thinks you want to see – the so-called ‘filter bubble’ we mentioned on page 52.
When you click a search result, Duckduckgo takes you directly to the relevant website, but doesn’t reveal what you searched for to get there, and will send you to the secure HTTPS version whenever possible. Unlike Google, Duckduckgo doesn’t store cookies in your browser, which means your searches can’t be tied to you, and you always start searching from a blank slate. The search data it does save is merely used to improve its performance, such as by recognising misspellings.
Rather than use your searches to build a profile of you that can be sold to advertisers, Duckduckgo takes a simpler, less intrusive approach. It’s still funded by advertising, but uses keywords to decide the type of adverts you see. For example, if you search for ‘HP laptop’, Duckduckgo will show ads for that model of computer, but fewer than on Google. If you’d prefer not to see any ads, click the menu button in the top-right corner, choose All Settings and switch off the Advertisements option (see screenshot below right).
As well as using the Duckduckgo website, you can install its extension for Chromium-based browsers and Firefox as well as its free app for Android and IOS (www.snipca.com/41847). You can also set it as the default search engine in your browser. Duckduckgo has just released a beta version of its first desktop browser, but currently only for macos (www. snipca.com/41879).
Duckduckgo compiles its search results using its own web crawler and more than 400 other sources, though primarily Bing. It swiftly returned accurate results for all our test searches (see box above), with Microsoft’s own specifications page top of the list for Windows 11 system requirements, and ticket-booking site Trainline ranked first for our travel search. The ever-reliable BBC Food site was top when we searched for a recipe for cottage pie.
Particularly impressive was the measurement conversion, telling us that 81kg equals 12.75532 stone in a box at the top of the page (see screenshot below left). The World Cup start date was less clear, but was mentioned in a summary of the first link (to a Sky Sports News story).