Expert Feature: There’s a New Kid On The Block (Google’s New Search Competition)
Google is the undoubted 800 pound gorilla and there’s a new David on the block that is trying to slay the giant (I think I’m mixing my story lines here.)
DuckDuckGo.com is a new search engine that does not track you or keep a history of your past searches.
For the paranoid who don’t like Big Brother tracking you, it’s the search engine that wants to take on the giant.
Google is amassing enormous amounts of data on each of us.
The more we give our identities to them through Google+, Gmail, and YouTube accounts (among many others), Google is tracking who our friends are, what we interact with, and details about our lives because of what we search for.
Why Google Gives You Free Stuff
Guess why they give us all these tools for free? They’re reading our e-mails, tracking our clicks with Google Analytics, and so on.
I recently heard a story about a man who found out his 16 year old daughter was pregnant because remarketing ads for diapers and baby things kept popping up on his computer. Turns out his daughter was using his computer.
In one sense, all this tracking is a good thing, because theoretically, search results will be more relevant to us each individually, because Google “knows” what we’re actually thinking when we do a search (read up on Google Hummingbird if you doubt me).
The bad part is that they are amassing this data to sell to advertisers or influence what ads show up (and thus what money we spend). Remember, that Google makes billions off the Adwords accounts that people have.
New Search Engine: DuckDuckGo
Along comes DuckDuckGo the search engine. It’s named after the children’s game, “duck duck goose” for some inexplicable reason.
But the search engine is actually quite sophisticated and seems to work well. Even when I did a test search for a “Livermore plubmer” (yes a typo), that it asked did I mean “Livermore plumber”? It brings up a search bar across the top that has all the Yelp listings, which is fine. (I have a love/hate relationship with Yelp, but that’s another article.)
Interestingly, under the settings, you can save your settings in the cloud, and it’s all super-encrypted with whatever password you choose. So even if they wanted to read your data, they can’t. So you can set up your settings and share them among computers.
I suppose if you really want to be footprint free, you should use DDG in your Chrome incognito browser.
I’m not so concerned about Google collecting data about me so much.
But it’s really (I mean REALLY) annoying all the remarketing ads that show up all over the place just because I looked at something on Amazon.
My only beef with the search engine is that typing “duckduckgo.com” into my browser is tedious. “google.com” just rolls off the fingers, perhaps because of years of practice? Maybe they can come up with a better name.
You can supposedly integrate DDG into Chrome and make it your default search engine, which I haven’t quite done yet. Maybe tomorrow.
Have you used the search engine yet?
Related article
- How Get Your Website To Have A Higher Ranking On Google And Other Search Engines (VIDEO) (baybusinesshelp.com)
