DuckDuckGo is a supposedly anonymous search engine. The CEO Gabriel Weinberg promises that absolutely no data is stored when requesting a search. Ever since the site launched in January 2011, the daily average requests grew from 36.000 per day to 5 million. Compared to other anonymous search engines, DuckDuckGo features an amazing search and ranking algorithm.
DuckDuckGo is a great search engine for people who don’t want third parties to financially benefit from their search statistics and their personal information. Google stores these statistics and utilizes them for marketing purposes and sells them to third parties.
You are not 100% anonymous with DuckDuckGo.
DuckDuckGo states in their privacy policy that they will never store any of your searches. However, it is also stated that DuckDuckGo will comply with law enforcement requests. In other terms, DuckDuckGo allows the NSA for insance to read and save IPs, search requests and DuckDuckGo’s unique User IDs.
In conclusion, DuckDuckGo is not a solution to administrative surveillance. Still, I’m probably going to resort to this anonymous search engine more often in the future. I mean, look at this cute duck face in the logo! It’s irresistible!
Image Source: Screenshot of DuckDuckGo‘s frontsite.
