Why did I Ditch Google for DuckDuckGo
I stopped using Google as my default search engine
Have you ever been planning a vacation to a place with your friends in a chat application and when you open a web page, suddenly an advertisement appears about a tourist attraction in the place we want to visit from a Travel service provider? Yup, that’s the internet. The internet has become an ad network that is ready to track your every move, interest, hobby, desire, even to your disgrace and shame.
Then there is such a thing as Google. Who doesn’t know Google? Almost every time we connect to the Internet, we definitely do a search through Google. In fact, based on data from bytraject.com, Google has an 88.16% share of the worldwide search engine market and receives more than 63,000 searches per second on any given day. This is not without reason, fast searches and relevant results make many people trust Google as their main search engine.
However, behind all the convenience we get, there is an invisible cost we have to pay, whereby, Google effectively monetizes all the data it collects about us. The more we use Google products, the more Google knows about us.
Need proof? Google News knows all the news articles that we are interested in, if we like football, then articles about football and similar sports will appear. Google Photos knows the faces of people around us and where we take the photo. Google Search knows our search history, knows the disgrace we hide from our friends. Even Google Maps knows the place we visited on May 10, 2021, at 15:33, how long we were in that place and how we got to that place. Even Google can find out where we live and where we work without having to tell them. Creepy isn’t it?
From there I started to think about how to protect the privacy of my data. Where everyone has the right to the privacy of their own data and may not be used by others for their own interests, especially without the knowledge and permission of the data owner.
Due to the above reasons, I finally decided to look for an alternative to Google as a search engine, and I came across one search engine that emerged due to growing concerns over surveillance and privacy, namely DuckDuckGo.
