“The Internet privacy company that empowers you to seamlessly take control of your personal information online, without any tradeoffs.”
— https://duckduckgo.com/
Welcome to DuckDuckGo
We’re setting the new standard of trust online, empowering people to take control of their information. You deserve privacy. Companies are making money off of your private information online without your consent. At DuckDuckGo, we don’t think the Internet should feel so creepy and getting the privacy you deserve online should be as simple as closing the blinds. With our roots as the search engine that doesn’t track you, we’ve expanded what we do to protect you no matter where you go on the Internet.
- Privacy, simplified. Our app and browser extension stop you from being tracked, so you can Internet with peace of mind.
- Search privately. What you search for is your own business. Switch to the search engine that doesn’t track you.
- Get privacy tips. You deserve privacy online. And now with DuckDuckGo’s help, you can learn how to get it.
- Our Mission: Too many people believe that you simply can’t expect privacy on the Internet. We disagree and have made it our mission to set a new standard of trust online.
Download DuckDuckGo Privacy Browser from the iOS App Store and Android Play Store.
DuckDuckGo (DDG) is an Internet search engine that emphasizes protecting searchers’ privacy and avoiding the filter bubble of personalized search results. DuckDuckGo distinguishes itself from other search engines by not profiling its users and by showing all users the same search results for a given search term, and emphasizes returning the best results, rather than the most results, generating those results from over 400 individual sources, including crowdsourced sites such as Wikipedia, and other search engines like Bing, Yahoo!, and Yandex. In November 2018, it had 29,661,659 daily direct searches on average.
The company is based in Paoli, Pennsylvania, in Greater Philadelphia, and has 55 employees. The company name is a reference to the children’s game duck, duck, goose.
Some of DuckDuckGo’s source code is free software hosted at GitHub under the Apache 2.0 License, but the core is proprietary. The company registered the domain names ddg.gg on February 22, 2011, ddg.co on September 20, 2013, and acquired duck.com on December 12, 2018, which are used as shortened URL aliases that redirect to duckduckgo.com.
Why should I use DuckDuckGo instead of Google?
#1 — Google tracks you. We don’t.
You share your most intimate secrets with your search engine without even thinking: medical, financial and personal issues, along with all the day to day things that make you, well, you. All of that personal information should be private, but on Google it’s not. On Google, your searches are tracked, mined, and packaged up into a data profile for advertisers to follow you around the Internet through those intrusive and annoying ever-present banner ads, using Google’s massive ad networks, embedded across millions of sites and apps.
In fact, it’s a myth that you need to track people to make money in web search. When you search ‘car’ we can show you a car ad without knowing anything about you. That’s how we make money and it doesn’t involve tracking because it is based on the keyword and not the person. Google could do this too; they just choose not to— all that tracking is to power their ad networks so that ads can follow you around the Internet using your search history and other information they have on you.
So-called incognito mode won’t protect you either. That’s another myth. “Incognito” mode isn’t really incognito at all. It’s an extremely misleading name and in my opinion should be changed. All it does is delete your local browsing history after your session on your device, but does nothing from stopping any website you visit, including Google, from tracking you via your IP address and other tracking mechanisms like browser fingerprinting.
To keep your searches private and out of data profiles, the government, and other legal requests, you need to use DuckDuckGo. We don’t track you at all, regardless what browsing mode you are in.
Each time you search on DuckDuckGo, it’s as if you’ve never been there before. We simply don’t store anything that can tie your searches to you personally, or even tie them together into a search history that could later be tied back to you.
—Gabriel Weinberg, CEO & Founder at DuckDuckGo.com
Read the 9 other reasons to use DuckDuckGo instead of Google »
