Unlike Google, DuckDuckGo, a promising search engine with an impressive recent growth lets you search the web privately. A typical Google search betrays who you are to government bodies, companies, organizations, advertisers etc. Your personal search history is no secret, other search engines pass on your personal search history with third parties for different purposes, . DuckDuckGo, a Google search alternative promises to allow you to search the web without tracking, not to send your searches to other sites or store your personal information in any way and drop the clutter.
On any other other search engines, when you search for something private, you are sharing that private search not only with your search engine, but also with all the sites that you clicked on. when you visit any site, your computer automatically sends information about it to that site (including your User agent and IP address). Usually your searches are saved along with the date and time of the search, some information about your computer (e.g. your IP address, User agent and often a unique identifier stored in a browser cookie), and if you are logged in, your account information (e.g. name and email address).
DuckDuckGo prevents search leakage by default. Instead, when you click on a link on the site, the search engine route (redirect) that request in such a way so that it does not send your search terms to other sites. This information can often be used to identify you directly. The other sites will still know that you visited them, but they will not know what search you entered beforehand.
DuckDuckGo’s traffic as of mid-year 2012 stood at 40 million a month. Last month as Edward Snowden unraveled his NSA surveillance leaks, it nearly doubled again—with traffic spiking 90 percent. According to Gabriel Weinberg, the CEO and founder of DuckDuckGo.“Not tracking people is core to what we do,” Weinberg says. “But that doesn’t require any additional technical energy, so our focus is actually on improving results.”
Launched in 2008, the company decided not to store IP addresses in 2009— which can be used to identify the physical location of a computer device connected to the Internet — or to track user information.
DuckDuckGo makes money by advertising, but ads that show up are pegged to keywords rather than user profiles. The company also add an affiliate code to some eCommerce sites (e.g. Amazon & eBay) that results in commissions being paid back to DuckDuckGo when you make purchases at those sites.
