DuckDuckGo security better, endorses Dorsey
New Delhi, Dec. 8: Twitter founder and CEO Jack Dorsey last week revealed that he has been using DuckDuckGo as his default search engine for quite some time now, apparently due to its stronger privacy features compared to other popular alternatives such as Google Chrome, among others.
DuckDuckGo claims that it is different from tech giants like Google and Facebook, which track user activities to provide targeted ads and services.
Experts feel that DuckDuckGo is still quite a small player compared to Google Chrome which is used by over 2 billion people globally for Internet browsing but it can indeed be seen as an alternative for those who care for their privacy.
“One thing that makes DuckDuckGo different from other search engines is that it does not profile its users and shows all users the same search results for a given search term which helps in giving out the best searches, cancelling all fake websites and click baits that can easily download themselves into our system,” John Dong, Director, Tenda, a leading provider of networking devices, said.
Launched in 2008, DuckDuckGo’s search engine is far behind Google, with its average number of searches per day reaching close to 50 million, while Google processes more than 3.5 billion search queries a day.
But just because the browser does not profile its users, it does not mean ads are not served on the platform.
“It is a myth that search engines need to track you to make money on Web search. When you type in a search, we can show an ad just based on that search term. For example, if you type in ‘car’, we show a car ad. That doesn’t involve tracking because it is based on the keyword and not the person,” explains the DuckDuckGo website.
The DuckDuckGo browser features smarter encryption and private search — all designed to operate seamlessly together while a user searches and browses the web.
“We are growing faster than ever with our first 14M day on Jan 10, 2017,” Gabriel Weinberg, CEO and founder, DuckDuckGo, said.