I hate not making the time to post to my blog every day, because every day I collect so many ideas about which I want to reflect and share. As I haven’t posted in a while, I am bursting with ideas—few of which will have the time to be posted here at tt.us. But here is a must share: the DuckDuckGo search engine.
Everyone who knows me knows I’m a huge advocate of personal privacy and a huge opponent of corporate personhood. The best reason, in my humble opinion, to demand privacy was articulated by Justice Brandie in 1928: “the right to be left alone.” I believe that people have a fundamental right to be left alone as long as they are not harming anyone. And, I actively assert everyone’s right to have corporate entities leave them alone too.
I personally think people are too indifferent to how much we are being manipulated and influenced by corporations. Nowhere is secret corporate influence more powerful than our digital lives where everything we say, write, inquire about (search), read (even how we read our digital books) is carefully collected and studied with profit incentive driving that data mining. And it goes way beyond this, way1 …
At any rate, I’ve been over the Google search engine (for these reasons and more) for a long time but never felt as though I could find a satisfactory search engine that would preserve my privacy and not insulate me in my own filter bubble when searching. DuckDuckGo is a true find. Having tried it for a while now, I am very pleased with it.
The DuckDuckGo search engine does not track users. It makes no effort to send you the results it thinks you want after studying your search patterns. It makes no effort to send you search results based on corporate payment. It does provide search results that include images, news, places, and can even be restricted to search thousands of selectable sites2. In many ways it feels like Google, but without all of the hideous advertisements clogging up your search results. It can be customized (regionally, themed, language). You can even choose to not include advertisements in your search results.
Today I actually committed to the DuckDuckGo search engine as my default search engine in Safari 73, and I set it as my default homepage when I open a new window in Safari. I encourage you to explore DuckDuckGo for your search needs. Compare it to Google, Yahoo, and Bing. I think you will find it competes very well.
When OS 10.10 (Yosemite) and iOS 8 are released, users will be able to even more easily select the DuckDuckGo search engine as their default search engine. It’s past time to take the internet back from corporations.
Now, if I could just find a solution that will let me whitelist cookies in my browser so I can block websites from tracking everything I do online!
Related articles
- Could DuckDuckGo Overtake Bing? (searchengineland.com)
- DuckDuckGo attacks Google’s filter bubble (philbradley.typepad.com)
- DuckDuckGo To Be Featured In Apple’s iOS 8 by @mattsouthern (searchenginejournal.com)
- Apple’s iOS 8 could be huge for search engine DuckDuckGo (venturebeat.com)
- Apple will let you ditch Google search for DuckDuckGo in iOS 8 (theverge.com)
I have highly recommend Eli Pariser’s book, The Filter Bubble, on many occasions. ↩
like, for example, a search restricted to amazon.com ↩
You can easily set DuckDuckGo as your default search engine by simply going to DuckDuckGo and clicking on the “Use in Safari” link at the bottom of the page. It runs a script asking your permission to install the DuckDuckGo Safari extension. Click “OK.” Poof. Done. ↩