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Small but Proud: DuckDuckGo vs. Ad Monsters



Maintaining anonymity was one of the key principles of the initially free Internet, which, however, has been constantly trampled upon by the largest titans of the Internet technology market for more than 20 years: search engines, social networks and trading platforms. And all the more valuable in this ocean of total surveillance the coveted "islands of freedom", with one of which we would like to introduce you in this review.

Meet: DuckDuckGo - a search engine that is fundamentally different in its principle of operation from the "big five" search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing, Baidu, Yandex). The main difference between DuckDuckGo is that it respects the principles of confidentiality and anonymity on the Internet and does not collect any information about its users.

How did DuckDuckGo come about?


The founder of this fast-growing search engine is an American named Gabriel Weinberg. Weinberg, who already had the experience of several startups of varying degrees of success (from the ahead-of-time but not very popular school social network Learnection, in which parents and teachers could communicate, to the more successful project NamesDatabase, the predecessor of Facebook), one day unexpectedly discovered that Google gives users far from the most relevant results for their requests, and decided to improve it.

The first version of DuckDuckGo, which appeared in 2008, was based on collecting information from other sources and filtering the results so that the search results contained as useful links as possible at the very beginning. And in this first version, the main feature of the search engine was already present, for which it is so loved by those who do not want to allow commercial technologies to interfere with their personal lives: the system was not worried about the interests of users and their personal data (gender, age or nationality). And they still don’t care: DuckDuckGo today is a system without borders, for which there are no resources blocked by local laws and there is no tracking of users.

From convenience to privacy


Interestingly, the confidentiality of user information at first did not interest Weinberg at all: in the first place he put the convenience of a search engine. However, after not very successful steps to advance, the developer got the idea to focus on the privacy advertisement of DuckDuckGo, which from the very beginning had no tools for tracking users. And just the confidentiality that Google, Yandex and other IT industry leaders cannot provide to the user, turned out to be the chip due to which DuckDuckGo so powerfully shot, which quickly turned in the eyes of users from the “ugly duckling” into a beautiful swan.

In 2011, a major investor came to Weinberg, who invested $ 3 million in promotion and further development. At the same time, the owner of Union Square Ventures (the same investor company) later admitted that he helped the project not at all out of selfish motives and did not even dream that DuckDuckGo would ever supplant Google. His goal was completely different: to enable every interested user to search for information on the Internet safely, without fear of surveillance by advertising companies and various government agencies.

How DuckDuckGo differs from Google and Yandex


The main task of DuckDuckGo is not fictitious, but real depersonalization of user information. Search engines track the personal information of users and then transmit it to advertising companies (at least), although, according to representatives of Google and Yandex, they do it in a “depersonalized” form, that is, without reference to a specific account and person. Nevertheless, it is unlikely that anyone can stop search engines from personifying such information upon request, and as a result, not only advertising services, but also law enforcement agencies will know everything about you: which sites you visit, where you register, with whom and how you communicate. And about how this information is sometimes used in Russia, not only advanced users know, but also many of those who are not too dedicated to the details of the work of search engines.

How DuckDuckGo Helps Maintain Online Privacy


DuckDuckGo widely supports privacy software. For example, the search engine is fully compatible with the Tor browser and is even integrated into it as the default search engine (Firefox and Chrome have also made DuckDuckGo the main search engine for some time). And last year, DuckDuckGo allocated 600 thousand dollars to fight for the rights of users of the World Wide Web, and a significant part of this money went to the developers of the Tor browser.

Spit DuckDuckGo and national restrictions: the search engine does not block links to questionable resources from the point of view of the legislation of a country, so you can be sure that you will find the information you need. Conveniently? Of course. Moreover, blocked sites often suffer completely undeservedly (remember at least several years fighting for the truth and official recognition of RuTracker).

And just a month ago (March 5, 2020), DuckDuckGo dazzled the Internet audience by publishing thousands of web trackers immediately, monitoring users without their consent. Google was a clear leader in spy trackers on the Internet: the tentacles of this search giant were seen on 85% of the sites analyzed. With a significant lag, second place in this dubious ranking is occupied by the brainchild of Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook, whose trackers were seen on 36% of sites. Zuckerberg at a security conference held in Munich in February 2020, said that measures need to be created “that would allow us to intervene in order to remove content that is dangerous”, that is, he said, it turns out that trackers do care about the user, slipping him exclusively safe content. Closes the same spy three Adobe,one of the largest software developers, with 22%.

What do these trackers do? They know everything about you: gender, age, place of residence, type of your computer or mobile device. And even your name for a number of them is not a mystery. In return, you get candy in the form of "personalized search results" for your virtual account. However, why do we need accounts and personalized search results if the search engine is able to cope with your queries without it? That's right: they are needed in order to make it easier to track you, and their benefits are dubious, not to mention the fact that many are simply annoyed by the heap of additional (most often advertising) information offered by trackers according to your requests.

So, do you want to provide detailed information about yourself to Internet companies that will then sell them to any interested person? We don’t want to either, so DuckDuckGo has long been chosen. And we are not alone: ​​on the "duck side" and many well-known pioneers of the Internet. So, Twitter creator Jack Dorsey recently confessed his love for DuckDuckGo.

DuckDuckGo helps protect against spyware trackers by installing free apps and browser extensions. These extensions block the action of malicious scripts, blocking the oxygen of Google, Facebook and other immoral Internet movers and making staying on sites really safe.



What makes DuckDuckGo


The service has one source of income: advertising. “So are they really watching us?” - the frightened user will think. We hasten to reassure: no, they do not follow, because this advertisement simply corresponds to the request and is automatically selected by the service. For example, you typed “shoe sales in Moscow” - the search engine next to the target links will give you an advertising banner from a suitable partner. And this is the only “tracking” script that DuckDuckGo has. Moreover, it was not in vain that we put the surveillance in quotation marks: the search system will not receive any information about you, other than the actual request. Moreover, the history of your search is also not stored anywhere, so every time you go to DuckDuckGo, as they say, from scratch.

Another way to generate revenue for the company: commission for clicking on the links of partner sites. Everything here is honest: you don’t know that this or that site is a DuckDuckGo partner, and the partner will not receive any data about you from the search engine.

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