I do a lot of my SEO work with Google’s systems; their Search Console system (which used to be called Webmaster Tools) is the best place for official Google search stats, I report using client’s rankings within Google, and in most people’s minds ‘google’ is synonymous with search anyway.
But it’s not the search engine I use for my own searches. That’s DuckDuckGo.
I’ve long been more than a little concerned about the privacy issues that surround Google. DuckDuckGo solves a lot of those for me – they don’t track users, searches, etc.
But the very things I love about it are the same things I don’t. With all it’s tracking Google gives us a hell of a lot of convenience. For example DuckDuckGo doesn’t know where I am. One the one hand, yay. On the other – they’re unable to give me relevant searches based on my location.
The less they know about me the less useful they are.
A blank slate search every time I search is great for privacy, but it’s definitely less efficient.
For now I’ll keep erring on the side of privacy. The things I know big data does with my information scares me. Let alone all the other things I don’t.
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