Search Engines without Big Brother

I wrote about a New Search Engine – DuckDuckGo last year. DuckDuckGo is a search engine that maintains your privacy since it does not record who is doing the searching.

This seems more important than it did last year. The NY Times recently published an article about ways to maintain the privacy of your online searches. I was pleased to see that DuckDuckGo was given prominent mention.

I’ve been using DuckDuckGo as a search engine for almost a year now. I don’t use it every time I search but I have found it works well. Since they don’t keep track of your searches, you don’t see choices influenced by your history. It is called a filter bubble when your search results are influenced by your history. You can miss results that the search engine “thinks” you are less likely to be interested in.

The filter bubble can be good in that it shows what you are most likely looking for but it is also bad as it may exclude results and you may not even realize it. Search without the bubble and you may find something you would miss with other searches.

So if you are concerned with keeping your search history private, try https://duckduckgo.com/. Even if your concern is pretty minimal, you might want to try it to see a different set of results. When I am doing a search I frequently repeat it using a variety of search engines.

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