By far and away the most popular search engine on the Internet is Google Search, but using it and many other of the well-known search engines does mean giving up some of your privacy. Only this morning I searched for a Micro SD card and inserted into the Google search results was a reminder I'd bought a Transcend card a few months ago. That's a little unnerving.
There is an alternative, though, and it's celebrating 10 billion anonymous searches today. That alternative is called DuckDuckGo, and its stated mission is to be "the world's most trusted search engine."
The 10 billion total was actually achieved at the end of 2016 (with four billion logged last year alone), but according to DuckDuckGo CEO and founder Gabriel Weinberg, new records are continuing to be set this year. For example, January 10 was the first day the search engine handled 14 million searches.
DuckDuckGo certainly appeals to the privacy conscious. The search engine's homepage promises no personal information is ever stored, adverts are not going to follow you around the web, search history is not stored, and no tracking is done regardless of whether you are using a private browsing mode.
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This alternative way of offering search also proves it's possible to make money without needing to let advertisers track you. It certainly won't be the billion Google generates, but then DuckDuckGo is a much smaller organization and focused just on search.
This revenue-generating ability is demonstrated by the fact DuckDuckGo last year donated $225,000 to nine organizations promoting online trust, including the Freedom of the Press Foundation, Freenet Project, OpenBSD Foundation, CryptTech Project, Tor Project, Fight for the Future, Open Source Technology Improvement Fund, Riseup Labs, and GPGTools.
Whatever your views are regarding privacy online, why not try DuckDuckGo and see if it sticks? And if you start to miss Google, then just use bangs.