DuckDuckGo is what Google was

I’ll never forget the day I fell in love with Google.  With my US Robotics dial-up modem tying up the phone line, I discovered their elegant and uncluttered home page.  A search box and a logo–what else do you need?  A lot has changed since that day and Google’s no longer as clean and trustworthy as they once were.  That’s why I’m a big fan of DuckDuckGo.  It’s everything Google was before it became overrun with ads and global controversy.

Founded around the same time JDM Digital was (2006), DuckDuckGo is a search engine that emphasizes protecting users’ privacy and avoiding the filter bubble of personalized search results.

As proof they’re not out to track you, there’s not even a login link anywhere on their website that I can find.

I love their tagline: “DuckDuckGo: The search engine that doesn’t track you.”

DuckDuckGo distinguishes itself from other search engines by not profiling its users and by deliberately showing all users the same search results for a given search term.  DuckDuckGo also emphasizes getting information from the best sources rather than the “most” sources, generating its search results from key crowd-sourced sites like Wikipedia and from partnerships with other search engines like Yandex, Yahoo!, Bing, and Wolfram Alpha.

On May 21, 2014, DuckDuckGo launched a redesigned UI focused on smarter answers and a more refined look.   See for yourself.  The new version adds often requested features like: images, local search, and auto-suggest but keeps the same uncluttered look and feel they’ve become famous for.

Give DuckDuckGo a try.  You might even fall out of love with Google as I have.