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Papas Fritas writes:
"There's an interesting read today by John Paul Titlow at FastCoLabs about DuckDuckGo, a search engine launched in 2008 that is now doing 4 million search queries per day and growing 200-500% annually. DuckDuckGo's secret weapon is hardcore privacy. When you do a search from DuckDuckGo's website or one of its mobile apps, it doesn't know who you are. There are no user accounts. Your IP address isn't logged by default. The site doesn't use search cookies to keep track of what you do over time or where else you go online.
'If you look at the logs of people's search sessions, they're the most personal thing on the Internet,' says founder Gabriel Weinberg. 'Unlike Facebook, where you choose what to post, with search you're typing in medical and financial problems and all sorts of other things. You're not thinking about the privacy implications of your search history.' DuckDuckGo's no-holds-barred approach to privacy gives the search engine a unique selling point as Google gobbles up more private user data. 'It was extreme at the time,' says Weinberg. 'And it still may be considered extreme by some people, but I think it's becoming less extreme nowadays. In the last year, it's become obvious why people don't want to be tracked.'"
(Score: 5, Informative) by TheRaven on Friday February 21 2014, @08:55AM
They do a few other things too. For example, if you type !amazon in your search terms, then you get the result of your search on the Amazon site, but via the referrer link. This means that they get some percentage of anything you buy. I usually just type things I'm looking to buy into the search box and then add !amazon if I don't find it in a quick search of the web.
Those commands are really useful. The !freebsd tag will search FreeBSD man pages, !devapple will search the Apple developer database, and so on. I find it really useful to have a single search box that can redirect me to all of the site-specific searches that I use easily. Most of the ones I use don't provide referrer kick-backs, but some do, and I'm very happy for DDG to get the money.
I switched to using them around 2008 when Google decided to hijack the up and down arrow keys in the search box. On OS X, up-arrow in any text field means jump to the start, and having to relearn muscle memory for a single Google text box was a UI decision that killed the utility of the site for me. At the time, DDG also did the infinite-scrolling thing (no other search engines did, although they all added it soon after) and had a much cleaner UI. I exchanged a few emails with Gabriel over usability issues that were present and he set up a test site for me to complain about and then fixed all of the issues and rolled out that version on the main site. Amazing service and not something I'd see from any of the big search companies (and I know quite a few people who work at Google and Yahoo! personally...).
I still find their zero-click information very useful. Gabriel has actually been very clever there, avoiding the need for complex natural language processing by making it easy for users to explicitly disambiguate what they really mean.
sudo mod me up