For the Western world, the two most common search engines that people use are Google and Bing. Sometimes your parents may have used Yahoo if it had already came preloaded onto their computer or if they are a fan of the old email services.
However there is a new rising contender to take the throne of the most used search engine, DuckDuckGo. DuckDuckGo is an internet search engine that focuses on protecting the privacy of their users by avoiding filters and personalized results. If you have ever used Google you may have noticed that once you looked at buying a certain product online, that same product will pop up everywhere to try to convince you to finalize that purchase. DuckDuckGo allows you to browse the internet anonymously and avoiding those pesky tracked ads.
Additionally, DuckDuckGo doesn’t prioritize adverts over other search results so you can better find what you are looking for. The developers behind DuckDuckGo have several reasons why you should be using them over Google with the main ones being escaping their tracking, ecosystem and filter bubbles and joining a community that listens to their users and doesn’t track them based off everything that search for.
DuckDuckGo also has a feature called !bangs that allows users to search for websites immediately and dodging all search engines altogether. The basis behind it is to get rid of that trapped and tracked feeling and getting your internet privacy back.
At the beginning of 2015 DuckDuckGo reached a total of 4.5m queries and have just hit over 22m this year and they look like they will continue to climb.
Raphael Garcia is just getting his start a reporter. He attended a technical school while still in high school where he learned a variety of skills, from photography to car mechanics. Raphael also helps keep The Marketing Folks social media feeds up-to-date.