If you were born before 1984 (ominous…) then you probably recall a time on the Internet when using a search engine was more a dark art than science, and finding a relevant result often meant digging through dozens of pages of returns from engines like Alta Vista, Yahoo, and Ask Jeeves. Then, in 1997, Google changed all of that. Suddenly the information you were looking for seemed to appear in the first few results, and as Google got better at indexing the entire Internet, they even began to know what you were looking for before you even finished typing. It truly seemed magical.

But as this predictive technology improved, few users were stopping to ask HOW Google was able to provide this level of insight. The short answer is personal data, and lots of it. For people concerned about privacy, that is obviously a major concern, but fortunately, a great alternative option exists: DuckDuckGo.

The good old days?

The History of DuckDuckGo

DuckDuckGo was founded in 2008 by Gabriel Weinberg, who initially self-funded the site. While the site was certainly not an overnight success, it did well in some startup competitions, and in 2008 was featured on TechCrunch’s Elevator Pitch Friday, and was a finalist as well in the 2008 BOSS Mashable Challenge. In 2011, it received venture capital backing by Union Square Ventures and a number of angel investors. The site continued a slow-but-steady growth, and by September of 2012 the search engine was attracting 1 million searches a day, and increasing to over 2 million searches per day by 2013.

As growth continued, a number of larger players in the technology world began including DuckDuckGo as one of the default search providers. The GNOME Project included DuckDuckGo in their web browser in 2013, followed by Apple with their Safari browser in 2014.

The slow but steady rise of daily traffic for DuckDuckGo.

How This Helps With Privacy

The main concern with search engines and privacy is that over a long period of time, companies like Google begin to accumulate a massive amount of data about what you’ve searched for. Tie this into the fact that they often have deep access into your Gmail, chat transcripts, location data, and photo history, and the potential for having a deep insight into your private life in almost unavoidable.

DuckDuckGo is often referred to as a hybrid search engine. What this means is that DuckDuckGo takes your search, strips it of personally identifiable data, and then finds results in a few different ways:

Utilizing traditional search engines like Bing and Yahoo.

Using their own web crawler (DuckDuckBot) to search the web.

Crowd-sourced sites like Wikipedia.

It then takes the best of those results and returns relevant results back to you securely.

The company claims that their goal is to create a search engine that puts privacy first, and works towards this goal by removing IP addresses after searches are returned, logs no user information, and uses cookies only when necessary. Some of their technology is open-source and available for developers to monitor as well. While DuckDuckGo does monetize around ads, these ads are returned in the context of the terms that you searched for, rather than by allowing advertisers to target your personal data.

DuckDuckGo marketing, positioning the company heavily around privacy.

How to Get It

This is about as easy as it gets. Head on over to duckduckgo.com and start searching! If you want to get fancy, you can set it as your default search engine of choice on whichever browser you’re using (hopefully Firefox, for reasons I outlined in my previous Practical Privacy — Firefox Browser article). For instructions on how to change your default search engine or change your homepage, see the instructions on DuckDuckGo’s support site.

It’s not exactly rocket science. Just enter duckduckgo.com into the address bar on your browser.

Alternative Options

As people begin to care more about their privacy, new search options that keep information private and secure are beginning to appear. Search Encrypt is a newer entry on that list, and looks to do a pretty decent job at securing your search terms and deleting your information afterward. StartPage is another hybrid search engine that has a fairly active base of users in Germany.

Parting Thoughts

Ensuring your privacy is respected when utilizing technology can be a tricky prospect, as there are many layers involved, and this is especially true for web services. If you’re already using a secure operating system like Linux, and you’ve replaced your browser with something open-source like Firefox, make sure that you’re also keeping your search terms private with something like DuckDuckGo.

Hopefully you enjoyed this article! To get some more great Practical Privacy tips, check out my other articles!