The DuckDuckGo Anonymity Promise

As a search engine that has been around since 2008, many users have only just learned of the existence of DuckDuckGo in the past few years and it has steadily increased in popularity ever since as it now handles around 70 million queries every single day. Of course, this isn’t quite as impressive as the reigning topdog Google, who receives at least 3.5 billion searches per day, however DuckDuckGo is a competitor with a cutting edge: anonymity. Read on as we explain what this means…

Everything that we search in Google is stored as data and then effectively sold to advertisers who use it in order to try and target us with the most appropriate ads based on our browsing habits. Although this process has been carried out for many years, the power that the search engine has is being put under the microscope more than ever in 2021 and user concerns are allowing competitors like DuckDuckGo to take the spotlight.

With a key focus on privacy, every search that a user makes using the DuckDuckGo search engine is anonymous. This means that you are presented with a ‘blank canvas’ and the search engine will display results to you as if you have never been there before whereas the same cannot be said for the bigger search engines like Google, Yahoo! and Bing. In fact, DuckDuckGo takes privacy so seriously that it is impossible to know for certain how many monthly users there are.

There is a common misconception that Incognito mode allows users to browse the Google search engine in the same way as DuckDuckGo, however this isn’t entirely true. After all, Incognito browsing only prevents Google from storing your search history but your IP address can still be tracked. The privacy promise from DuckDuckGo provides users who are concerned about their information being used to build advertising profiles to browse the web securely and anonymously.

In recent years, there has been a lot of debate regarding the amount of information that Google stores about its users and how exactly it uses this data. After all, the search engine knows everything about you based on your search queries. This has allowed competitive search engines like DuckDuckGo, which emphasises user privacy and anonymity, to increase in popularity. Although it isn’t about to run Google off the virtual ‘road’, it is safe to say that their bluff may be being called and we may even see a privacy crack-down in the distant-future.