In the United States, two out of every three searches go through Google, which serves up a total of three billion search queries per day. "Googling" has become so ubiquitous that the company has become a verb in English (and in other languages, too).
Given that most of us use Google several times a day and may also use it to send e-mail, to plan our calendar, and to make phone calls, questions commonly arise about how all of that data is used. Google has said that it needs access to such large amounts of data as a way to “make it useful” and to sell personalized ads against it—and to profit substantially in the process.
However, a March 2012 study from the Pew Internet and American Life Project found that two-thirds of Americans view a personalized search as a “bad thing,” with 73 percent of those surveyed saying that they were “not OK” with personalized searches on privacy grounds. Another recent poll of California voters recently reached similar results, as “78 percent of voters—including 71 percent of voters age 18-29—said the collection of personal information online is an invasion of privacy.”
Short of masking your online trail with a VPN or going through Tor all the time, it’s hard to avoid the watchful eye of Sergey and Larry. What's a privacy-conscious Web searcher to do? For those who worry about such issues, privacy-minded search alternatives in various stages of development do exist—even if they're only taking the tiniest bite out of Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo’s search engine market share.
DuckDuckGo
One of the top privacy search engines has a name reminiscent of a children’s game: DuckDuckGo. The site was founded two years ago but has recently taken off; just last month, it hit an all-time record of 1.5 million searches per day and its daily search traffic has grown by 227 percent in three months.
So what does DuckDuckGo do differently, besides putting up cheeky billboards in San Francisco? DuckDuckGo works by using both its own Web crawler and data from other search engines, including Yahoo, Bing, and Blekko—but not Google. The company claims not to log IP addresses or user agents, and “no cookies are used by default." It also uses default encryption modeled after HTTPS Everywhere.
“Not really knowing about [what the other guys do], we independently made the decision that we wanted to go down this route of not storing this data,” explained Gabriel Weinberg, the site’s founder, in an interview with Ars this month.
“Search engines have a history of getting subpoenas, and Google has been more and more open to the requests that they were responding to," he said. "It seemed inevitable that search engines would get requests from law enforcement—I don’t like that idea of handing over data.”
Beyond that, the company started operating a Tor exit enclave not long after it launched, allowing traffic headed for the DuckDuckGo search engine to exit the Tor network.
“That makes it easier for people on Tor to hit our search engine and it means that we don’t store stuff and you can ensure that it exits through us. You can be end-to-end anonymous on Tor,” Weinberg added.
How does a site that makes a point of not tracking its users make money? Through contextualized search ads that generate “sponsored links.” Not that Google's money machine should start to worry yet; Weinberg says that his for-profit company earned around $115,000 in revenue in 2011—with three employees and a handful of other contractors.
But Weinberg says he's patient. He believes that users will ultimately come to DuckDuckGo because it’s a “better search experience,” not just because of privacy.
“The problem is that [people] have never had a choice,” he said. “They don’t perceive that they have a choice. If you say: yes, you can go to this privacy search engine, they feel that they’re sacrificing something for that. But I don’t want to hamper my search experience. We’ve been trying to offer high privacy and a comparable or better search experience [than Google].”
Weinberg’s not the only one saying it. Search Engine Land wrote last month that in terms of user experience and interface, DuckDuckGo “has begun to beat Google at its own game.”
Beyond search watchers, privacy watchers have also taken notice. Nicole Ozer, the technology and civil liberties policy director at the Northern California office of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in San Francisco, told Ars that she’s been watching DuckDuckGo for some time.
“Our position is that [the public] shouldn't have to choose between using new technology and keeping control of our personal information,” she said.
Privacy-conscious Internet users may wonder about the verifiability of DuckDuckGo's claims. The short answer is that there isn’t any good way to know if DuckDuckGo (or any other company) does what it says, short of the company releasing its source code. Weinberg has not submitted DuckDuckGo to an outside security audit, as he argues it would not add much in terms of convincing skeptics, but he notes in an online post that a company breaching its own privacy policy can lead to prosecution or sanctions from the Federal Trade Commission.
For many users, this is enough. “DuckDuckGo would be pretty dumb to breach their own privacy policy; their privacy policy is clear and unambiguous and leaves them little wiggle room,” a user called D.W. posted in an online security forum a month ago.
reader comments
78