Concern about data mining and the uses to which the mined data are put suggest that privacy is not just a matter of personal sensitivities. It may, at least partially, be a social duty if it can be achieved efficiently. Duck Duck Go seems to promote itself as reducing the personal contribution/exposure involved in data mining. https://duckduckgo.com/about
Dear Jim F Malone,
my experiences in using Duck Duck Go are quite positive - the search results obtained using this search platform are as reliable as produced by its biggest competitor plus the results are not littered by commercials. Its worth noting however that the Duck Duck Go is the default search engine for Firefox web browser so it is quite popular.
If you are interested in other "the big G" ;) competitors have a look also at yippy.com formerly known as clusty.com. It shows search results in a categorized way what is often very useful.
Thanks Anna. That's reassuring. I didn't know about Firefox offering it as an option, and downloaded it on a laptop I use occsaionally, to see what it is like. I t looks good and the page looks clean of the clutter of adds.
As with any technology it offers Pros and Cons. The added information harvested by search engines do better the search experience by relevance feedback on the engine. The experience with it depends on the values that a particular person has on privacy and how much the difference is perceived by the user.
I do value my privacy which is why for some queries I use it as well as other technologies, but when I do think there is no privacy concerns I use other more intrusive technologies.
Thanks Arturo and Anna. I decided to give it a go and am now using only it on one laptop. Very satisfied with results and will now move other machines over.
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