- By Admin
- January 25, 2017
- SEO
Duckduckgo is a new search engine and its USP is that doesn’t track you. It reached a milestone by records 14 million searches in one day in January 2017.
This speaks volumes about how many net surfers don’t want their activity on the internet to be tracked. Well, the brighter way of looking at it is the growing number of net users who are aware of data privacy and Google surveillance.
Google knows a lot about you and has never kept this a secret. We know that it saves all our searches, tracks and records our location and saves our voice every time we speak to it so much so that it also creates your profile based on your search history.
A lot of people are aware and do not like the idea Google storing everything you share with it. Hence Duckduckgo, a privacy-first search engine is gaining momentum in popularity. They have a staggering 10 billion searches since it started in 2010, with four billion searches happening in 2016 alone.
The founders of Duckduckgo, Gabriel Weinberg, say that the surge of activity on the website started around 2013, when Edward Snowden, former Central Intelligence Agent who revealed how the United States Government was spying on its citizens using their data on online behaviour.
Mr Weinberg also states a 2015 Pew Research which studies about Americans’ attitude towards privacy, security and surveillance,. This research says that 74 percent of the adults are of an opinion that “being in control of who can get information about them is very important to them” and 65 percent of them think “what information is collected from them is very important to them.”
DuckDuckgo witnessed a massive spurt in site’s activity with 600 percent increase in searches between 2013 and 2015.
Well, compared to Google with around 3.5 billion searches per day, DuckDuckgo may have quite a journey to complete but there are ways users have already found it better than Google.
How is Duckduckgo better than Google?
1.Duckduckgo lets you see people’s social media profile without leaving the search page. Type in your Twitter handle and see it for yourself.
2.Shorten and Expand Links: Use the prefixes shorten or expand followed by the link, e.g. shorten //www.itconsultingcompany.com.au/
3. Generate hard to crack passwords. Type “password 20” without quotes and Duckduckgo will throw a strong 20 character password. You could replace the alphabets with numbers. But if remembering the password is a challenge for you, go for XKCD style password, which is set to four common words put together to make a tough nut to crack.
4. Use stopwatch by simply typing ‘stopwatch’ in the search bar.
5. Checks if a particular website is down or up. Simply type “Is www.yourwebsiteurl.com down ”
6. Find Rhyming words: Have some fun and find rhyming words by typing for eg: “rhymes with duck ” to get the results like “buck, tuck, chuck, pluck.”
7. Use functional calendar by searching ‘Calendar” in Duckduckgo. You will get a calendar with the current date and year.
8. Calculate your loan: Just type “loan $600,000 at 4% with 25% down for 15 years”
9. It shows around 30 results for a search query on one page in comparison to Google’s 10 results.
10. It emphasises on getting search results from best sources rather than known sources hence has tied up with Yahoo!, Bing , Yandex and Yummly.
