The story of my experiments with DuckDuckGo

In the middle of all the welcome din around FB IPO, two contrasting tunes are gaining amplitude with every retweet:

1. Google's "One privacy policy to bind them all"
2. Duckduckgo's "We don't track you"

Google's privacy policy is their prerogative and it may not even be as evil as it sounded at first. But I wish that they had given a simple opt-out choice. Anyway, that was enough of an impetus for me to try the unthinkable: switch from Google and try out  DuckDuckGo - a privacy-guaranteeing search engine! By the way, I'm not the only one doing it nor the first. Om Malik (gigaom.com) tweeted that he's going to try DDG for 30 days. And he has 1.2M followers.

I've been using it for a week now and my impressions are: 

1. The World Did Not End! The search results are quite sufficient, thank you. (more on this below)
2. The !yt !quora "search a popular site directly" syntax is addictive
3. Search Suggestions on the right side are growing on me
4. And, surprise surprise, I'm not missing the Adverts at all!
5. There are 10 more reasons: http://nerdbusiness.com/blog/10-reasons-why-duckduckgo-awesome
6. And, come on, we have to support a single developer dreaming of taking on such a big effort, right?!

I still use Google.com for Maps, News, Images, Docs. But Search? I don't plan on going back for now. I may go back if DDG gets too crowded and slows down, I sincerely hope that they're able to scale with their business model.

So, why is Duckduckgo's search mostly sufficient? And herein may be the bigger challenge for Search Engine biggies like Google, Bing.

1. It's a Flat Flat Web: After over a decade in Wild West Web, some sites have emerged as the natural destination for many Searches -- Wikpedia, CNN, ESPN, WSJ are the general examples, but even a specific topic like "PHP" has php.net. All search engines show them at the top of their results. 
2. (Mostly) Similar Search Algorithms: If the the best result does not come up as the First, it’s in the top 10 results.
3. Universal Scalability: Thanks to Cloud, you can build a large scale system without actually buying it all up front.
4. There's always Google: If your search query is quite esoteric and duckduckgo does not give the satisfactory answer, you can always "!g " to send that query to good old Google ;-)

The 1st one should concern the large search companies. It challenges the current mantra that "we have to give up our privacy to improve search results".
And that begins to shake the whole Filter Bubble World we were told to move into - where personalization comes at the cost of privacy, and if a service is free, your profile is the product.
There may be a better alternative, after all!

     

thanks, vishy

Vishy Poosala

innovate & impact