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I’m in the 1% (of search engine users)
Why & what I learnt about privacy in switching from Google to DuckDuckGo
In June 2020, 1.5% of web searchers used DuckDuckGo.
I’m in that 1%.
I recently switched my default search engine from Google to DuckDuck Go, and this is an article about why, how and what I learnt from the process. I went in wanting to learn how this would affect my online experience, and I ended up learning rather interesting things about myself and data privacy.
Why I made the switch
I do remember a pre-Google Internet from high school where AltaVista was the dominant choice to find something on the web. Most websites still looked like directories of links that you could navigate to find what you wanted. You only needed a search engine when you were stymied, an experience akin to asking the librarian at the desk when scanning the shelves yourself didn’t quite work.
Google’s benefits became apparent when, as a college junior majoring in Computer Science, finding technical papers and research became a breeze with the new search engine. In hindsight, it’s obvious that a system based on backlinks would lend itself really well to a world of citations and references; back then, it instilled a lot of confidence in the brand new “find anything” tool. The simple…
