Monday, October 15, 2018

People are turning to search engines other than Google

People are smart:
Google has long been eyed with suspicion, and incidents such as covering up potential data leaks does nothing to help. Privacy and security have increased in importance for the average internet user, and this has seen people moving away from Google and investigating the alternatives.
One beneficiary of this shunning of Google is DuckDuckGo. The privacy-focused search engine has enjoyed a 50 percent surge in usage over the last year, and it can now boast a new record of 30 million daily searches.
I use Duckduckgo almost exclusively, since they are very clear that they do not track me.

8 comments:

  1. My problem with DuckDuckGO is that they are still American and could, in secret, be required to lie and track you anyway - remember what was revealed when the email provider Snowden used was shutdown; they shut down at the only time they could get away with it and it was revealed that other companies have required to lie to their customers about tracking and decryption.

    My preference is IXquick, who is based in the Netherlands and therefore outside reach of US courts. It also allows anonymous Google results, so you get the usefulness of Google without the tracking.

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  2. I switched to Bing during the 2008 elections. Google would not produce positive articles on its first page on searches regarding any Republican candidate, nor would it return many negative articles on searches on Democratic candidates.

    As to Jonathan H., well, I would trust much less anything that is fully under the powers of the EU. I actually trust Google more than any euro site. Which, admittedly, isn't much of an endorsement of Google.

    And, yes, Blogger is now a Google product. Used to not be. Which means one of these days some google-flunky will start attacking all the non-leftist blogsites.

    No where on the internet is safe from tracking or Big Brother. The 'Darkweb' is supposedly safer, but that way leads to a whole 'nother set of issues.

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  3. I recently found www.startpage.com as an alternate search engine.

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  4. If you get a chance, Sultan Knish has a good article up on Google. “When the Google Dream Died”.

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  5. Thing is Google could easily buy DDG. Then where are we? Google must be broken. They are so rich and powerful that only the government can do it and even then, the issue would be in doubt. Regulation won't do it because of regulatory capture. They need to be fragmented by anti-trust action. The components will still be evil but they will be less powerful.

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  6. DuckDuckGo is my go-to. I've also used IXquick.

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  7. D2 mostly and Yandex occasionally.
    And I search for some weird stuff every now and then, just to confuse the algorithm.
    Although doing that could be one of the reasons that a $200 tax stamp is taking so long to appear in my hands. :>)

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