We’re all on the web to search for information. There are over a billion different websites live on the internet. Manually searching for what you want from these plethora of websites is simply like searching for a needle in a haystack, no, – an ocean.
Who would want to search for a needle in an ocean?
I guess no one.
Search engines come to the rescue.
Search engines collect every needle in the ocean and present the specific needle you want to you, when you want it.
Forgive me for speaking in that way.
In simple terms, what I’m trying to say is that the internet is a great collection of web pages. Search engines collect all these web pages into their index. When you make a search via a specific search engine, it searches in its index and find the page that best fits your search term.
Over the years, search engines has proved overly useful to us, but not for free, exactly.
I’m not saying there’s a search engine that charges you for making a search, but search engines are making as much money from our “PERSONAL” information than ourselves.
How do they do this?
Google search is a personalized search engine, and so are all their top competitors. They collect my personal information (and yours), and try to make our searches personal by making it only things we’re interested.
An average user thinks that’s the only thing search engines does with our information. I guess not.
To save words, let me be clear. Search engines uses our search history to do a lot more than just personalize our search results. Here’s another thing search engines uses your search history, and mine for.
[lwptoc]
How search engines sell our information
Google runs a program (Google Ads) for advertisers to place ads in their search engine. Bing does that too.
When these advertisers place ads, they can choose to target exactly a specific audience.
For example, if I choose to advertise The Tech Ninjas to 19 year old guys with passion for football with love for online videos, it will be possible on Google, because it collects your information.
This feature alone invites advertisers to Google. Do you know how Google gets this whole lot of information?
It’s really simple. They collect a whole lot of information about you from everything you do on Google. They make it available for advertisers for easy targeting.
Guess what?
We, the owners of this particular information have nothing to gain from this.
Obviously, that’s a part of Google that isn’t completely fair. However, in a ttypical search engine comparison, a lot of factors will come into play.
Let’s observe each of these factors and see if DuckDuckGo is worth ditching Google for.
DuckDuckGo Search Engine Review
The DuckDuckGo search engine was founded in 2008, making it one of the youngest search engines to achieve massive popularity. The age might be a repulsive factor for many, as younger tech companies are fond of committing all kind of atrocities.
But, believe me, DuckDuckGo isn’t your regular internet company. They claim not to store any personal information of their users, – none at all.
Below the DuckDuckGo search bar, you can find the text that reads: “Our privacy policy is simple: we don’t collect or share any of your personal information.”
It seems they’re right.
Private search is DuckDuckGo’s unique selling point. But they do offer more features than just that.
When privacy is out of the game, DuckDuckGo search engine is just like every other search engine. It has a neat layout, similar to Google.
You get 10 search results on the results page, which is pretty much exactly like Google’s. While their ads may not be as domineering as that of their info-collecting competitors, they still serve a decent amount of contextual ads, spread evenly on the results page; typically two before the search results and two below.
Just like Googlebot, DuckDuckGo search engine also has a crawling bot they called DuckDuckBot. While DuckDuckBot works hard to crawl many pages as possible, it is a quite arduous task. To ease this process, more internet crawlers help DuckDuckGo, and most importantly, it is important to know that DuckDuckGo search engine sometimes copies the results of other search engines.
Also, it uses a Google-like knowledge base that gives details about the names, address and phone numbers of popular businesses. These information are gotten from Yelp, Wikipedia and many other numerous sources.
Locations are automatically generated from Bing maps, and you can set it to Google Maps, OneStreetMap or HERE Maps.
The DuckDuckGo results page is infinite scrolling, unlike Google’s. When you’ve viewed all the results in a particular page and you’ve not found a good match, you can click on the next page and continue viewing the results without having to load another page.
DuckDuckGo offers instant answers, which is just like the Google’s Featured Snippets. Instant answers won’t show up so often, so you should be prepared to click through to view your results. Maybe an update to the DuckDuckGo search engine will improve that.
Just like the Google Search, DuckDuckGo also offers a number of search verticals. They include:
DuckDuckGo also intelligently triggers applicable search verticals to searches. For example, if you search for a video, be prepared to see video results.
The DuckDuckGo search engine is widely gaining popularity, as it has grown by 56% in 2018 alone, powering more than 9 billion searches that year alone. In spite of that, DuckDuckGo still has a poor market share, and there is a lot of room for improvement.
How to install Linux on a Chromebook; An Easy Guide
Google search review
If you really know me, you’d have heard me say “everything starts from Google.”
That’s not untrue. As internet users, we’ve been trained to get all our information, not from search engines, but from Google.
Why is this?
Because Google is simply the best!
As much as I know, Google is the most robust search engine anyone can use. However, DuckDuckGo is the most secure. So, this is much like a competition between the best, and the safest.
For the basic user, Google is the search engine that will come most handy. The vast tools available on Google makes it the best option.
Google Maps, Google Home, Google Mail, Google Earth, Google AdSense, Google Analytics, Google everything. In fact, Google is the start and end of everything.
Most of Google’s products are what DuckDuckGo uses to get its results. Google Maps is unarguably the best, with details of almost everywhere in the world.
Although, we’re talking about Google as a search engine, we can’t just afford to miss the other tools available around it. If you search on Google, YouTube might choose to answer your question, – which is in fact, amazing, because it’s a Google product.
While DuckDuckGo has a lot of search verticals, Google has more verticals and you can even further customize your search experience.
In addition to the verticals offered by DuckDuckGo, you also get Shopping, Books, Finance and Flights verticals, – vertically awesome!
Google makes changes to its algorithm each day, to further give the users a better search experience.
Google isn’t only the largest search engine index with over 100,000,000 Gigabytes of pages in its index, it’s also the smartest.
It seems the domination of Google isn’t going to be competed with for quite some time.
However, Google is so powerful at the expense of our information. This is not unethical, as it is clearly stated in their Privacy Policy, but not everyone will be okay with that.
While there are some searches you won’t want Google to track; say you’re a developer, searching Google for “how to hack Google”. Seriously, you can get into trouble after the next major Google hack, lol.
However, while Google is right for most of the time, that doesn’t mean Google is perfect!
A search for “who is the CEO of Yahoo” revealed “Marissa Mayer” on the snippets, who’s been ousted years ago.
This is just an indication that computers can never be better than humans.
How to Easily Dual Boot Linux And Windows without a Disk Partition
Why should you choose DuckDuckGo search engine ahead of Google?
I’m a Google fanboy, and I do mostly everything on Google. I have most of my documents synced to Google Docs, etc.
However, I won’t recommend choosing Google Search over DuckDuckGo search engine.
Why is this?
Google has almost everything about you, stored somewhere. DuckDuckGo has pretty much nothing.
Imagine Google suffers a major hack. Every search you’ve made, right from day one will be accessible to the attackers.
However, I will be honest, – you can’t possibly leave Google totally. You’ll always come back to search why you actually left Google in the first place.
