DuckDuckGo search vs. Google search
Without a doubt the most used search engine across the Web by far is Google. For most people Google search is the ‘only’ search engine there is. Which is not true. There are a number of Web search engines competing against Google search including: Yahoo search, Bing search, Ask search, Dogpile search, Excite search, StartPage search, and many others.
In the post I am going to talk about my current favourite Web search engine: DuckDuckGo. Note that while DuckDuckGo is my favourite search engine, that doesn’t mean I don’t use Google from time to time if I can’t get the results I want from DuckDuckGo—which is rarely the case.
I started using DuckDuckGo about a year ago. At that time I just used it now and then. But now I use DuckDuckGo to do my Web searches much more than I use Google search.
DuckDuckGo has a number of differences to Google. The one that DuckDuckGo highlight is that they don’t track you online. They don’t keep a record of what you have searched for or what Web sites you have linked to.
Additionally, DuckDuckGo focuses much more on providing search results based on matching your search parameters rather than providing results based on advertising or other Google weightings.
As an example of how this changes the results of your search, if I search for “Nullewa Lake” using Google search then the top results are mostly travel related sites or mapping sites. Or even a site that tells you all about where you can fish and what kind of fish you can expect to catch in various lakes around the world.
Trust me. There are no fish in Nullewa Lake. While it covers a large area it is a shallow lake. At its deepest when it is full it is probably about two feet. Additionally, it is a salt lake in arid station country. It is so salty that I doubt even mosquitoes can breed in it. It is so salty that I suspect a car tyre thrown into it would float.
The bottom line here is that if you use Google search to look up Lake Nullewa you are not going to find any useful links until about the third page of results.
Searching for Lake Nullewa using DuckDuckGo will provide useful results on the first page.
The first result tells you where it is.
The second result points to this site and my posting about Nullewa Lake.
A Google search does not show my site—a ‘regular’ posting about Nullewa Lake—in the results until page four of its results. That is after giving you real estate information about Lake Nullewa (nobody is going to be buying land there), various mapping sites, mining information, holiday information (cough), Lake Drainage programmes, the three day weather forecast, and even Nullewa Parkway in Lakelands.
Bottom Line: I still use Google search for things like shopping searches because Google knows where I live and the stores I would likely be interested in. But I tend to use DuckDuckGo for all my ‘serious’ research and/or tricky searches.