DuckDuckGo vs Google: Is DuckDuckGo Better for Your Online Privacy?

- You are concerned about your privacy and if you're not concerned about your privacy, well you damn well should be. Our privacy is under constant attack, but we also are addicted to convenience and information. When we want to look for something online, we want to find it easily with small amount of effort and the balancing act between our privacy and convenience is a teeter totter that goes back and forth. Typically speaking though, for the most part, we're giving away something all of the time for convenience and that is privacy and the King of, well, there's several Kings, there's a whole Royal family of different organizations that are scooping up our privacy. With Facebook and Twitter and Google right at the very top of that pyramid. "Holy cow!" I'm mixing my metaphors. But today we're gonna talk about one way that you can recapture some of your privacy without giving up too much convenience. It has the very compelling name of DuckDuckGo. That's today on Dotto Tech. Steve Dotto here. How the heck are you doing this fine day. Today we're gonna have a conversation about privacy and this is always a bit of a minefield as we go through because I teach you here on this channel, how do you so many different tools and many of those tools will invade our privacy in a variety of different ways. I'm a big fan of using Google's tools, Google's tool Suite, but one of the things that Google does a lot is they take a lot of information from us and they utilize it in a variety of different ways. It's up to us as much as possible to recognize when we're giving up our privacy and what is happening with that and in a lot of cases we want to claw back some of that privacy and there is a way that we can claw back some of it through the search engine that we choose. Now, most of us choose the default certain change and that's installed with our browser. If we're using Chrome, we're using Google search, and there's good reason to use Google search cause it's really, really good. But, as you know from when you go and do any search in Google, that all of a sudden you're gonna be getting ads that are relating to what you're searching on and some people are comfortable with that. Other people not so much. Now, if you're not so much camp, then an option that you have is using a tool called DuckDuckGo as your search engine. So today let's take a look at how you go about changing search engines and making DuckDuckGo your default search engine and understanding a little bit about how that happens and what happens when you do that. Does that sound like a plan? Alright, let's dive in. Take a look at the DucDuckGo homepage, which describes their philosophy and their principles and gives us access to their tool. Now you can quickly do a search on DuckDuckGo just by going to their homepage without installing them in your browser and not changing anything. But most of us prefer to do all of our searching from our omnibar, from our menu bar within our web browser. So we'll walk through that process as we go along. But visiting the DuckDuckGo homepage, we recognize that their big concern is to deliver privacy for us. And if you go through, you can read through that. You can add it to your browser and browse as usual and they will tell us here that they won't store any personal information ever. Then you go, "Well, how do they make money then?" Well they make money through their advertising revenue by directly linking, when you're doing a search to the ads sites that are relevant for that particular search. Not for some historical search, which is one of the ways that Google and Facebook and others make money, but it's just based on that one search. So they're not gonna follow us around with ads after our initial search. You will get relevant information when you search, but it's the after that counts. They don't track you in and out of private browsing mode. They say here that other search engines track our searches. Even when we're in private browsing mode. That seems rather nasty and harsh, doesn't it? And you can switch back to DuckDuckGo. Now, there's a couple of ways that you can implement DuckDuckGo. They've got here the ability for you to add it to the browser that you're in. Now when you add it to the browser, they're just gonna automate a simple process that you can also do manually, which I'm gonna show you right now. Here's where and how our browsers use search engines. Here in the top bar, this is the search bar in Chrome, they call it the omnibar because it's doing more than search these days, but that's typically where we go in order to do a search. Now, we can control what browser this point's at for searching or what service this points at for searching by going into our preferences. And this is gonna work for all browsers. I'll quickly show it to you and the other browsers after, but here it is in Chrome. I click right here on search engine and here I can see that the search engine used in the address bar is Google. If I change it, I have some presets loaded here, I can change it to DuckDuckGo. So if I changed it to DuckDuckGo, watch what happens. All I do is when I open a new tab, look at what comes up. DuckDuckGo as our homepage. And you see here in the address bar that DuckDuckGo appears here in the address bar. So let's do a quick search because we'll compare it with the Google search because of course if it's not an accurate search, if it doesn't deliver what we're looking for, it doesn't do us much good then, does it?. So I'm gonna do a quick search for a product that I'm researching right now. I'm looking at the RODECaster Pro. I'm looking at this new, it's a new audio interface. And so there we see the search results coming up and we see that we're getting results from Rode. We're getting the results from B&H Photo, which is a retail site, another retail site here. We're getting into some reviews of it and we're getting some YouTube videos. So we're getting some reasonable results. And you can see here that DuckDuckGo also has the same classifications as we expect within Google search. We can search the web, we can also search for images. And there we see lots of different images of it. We can search for videos on it. And here it's bringing up a variety of different YouTube videos where people are reviewing it and looking at the product. Any news-related stories about it. Seven days ago there was a story in reverb.com. The Next Web did a story but a long time, so it hasn't been in the news an awful lot. And we could also go into shopping, which is gonna bring it up the direct sales site on Rode. And I imagine we'll see Amazon links. Yes, we see Amazon links at other links here. So we're pretty much getting the same information as we would if we were searching in Google. Let's change, for argument's sake, let's change our search engine back to Google and let's open a new window. Once again, I'm still in Chrome and now see it's different. Now it's opening the Google search page. And when I searched for the RODECaster Pro here. Here the results are a little bit more integrated because here's one thing, you see here on this side, the Evernote. This is because my Evernote account actually links to my Google account for search and it searches my Evernote account at the same time. So that speaks to some of the differences we see and we just see that Google basically formats the information differently. But we see the same basic results. We see the AVShop. A little more localized for me here because of Canadian retailers come up first. But then we have B&H Photo which came up at the top Rode, came up at the very top when we did the search in Rode for the same things. We saw the Canadian site first and then Rode. So just a slightly different order. But the same basic information. If we go through shopping is the next one. And we're gonna see the same listings in the shopping site. And if we choose images, we've got of course Google image search. It's gonna show us all of the same kind of results. So you're not really missing out a lot. I think as far as accuracy goes, that regardless of which tool you use, you're probably going to find what you're looking for using DuckDuckGo versus using Google. So it comes down to how much extra privacy you get as a result. Now before I leave, let's just jump quickly into Firefox. I'm gonna open up Firefox cause I wanna show you that the same principles apply in other browsers. So I've got Firefox open here. If I go into the Firefox preferences, I see here that I have search and if I go into search I can choose what search engine I want to use as my default search engine. If I choose DuckDuckGo, I can choose DuckDuckGo. When I create a new tab, you can see that the searching is happening within DuckDuckGo and actually says right here, "That the search with DuckDuckGo is there." And if we need extra proof, if you're on a Mac, if we go into Safari, we open Safari, we open Safari preferences and we have the exact same options here. Just slightly laid out slightly differently. I already had DuckDuckGo chosen as my primary search engine within Safari, so you have the option within Safari to search as well to change up and use DuckDuckGo. If you choose to as your main search engine, pretty easy to get your head around using and designating DuckDuckGo as your search engine. But is it worth it? I guess there's three questions that I have. First of all, "Is it really more private?" Secondly, "How do they make money?" I always wanna know and be sure that I am not being hoodwinked in some way in the revenue side. And the third question is, "What am I giving up?" Is it an inferior search engine, search experience to what I'm experiencing currently with Google. What do you think, Farley, you interested in this too? Farley seems interested in the topic as well. Go sit there buddy. All right, so let's start with the first question which is privacy and I think we're just gonna go straight to the duck for that and check what DuckDuckGo says. We will put a link below, but this is their privacy page and they state right up front and very firmly exactly what their position is as far as our privacy. If you are going to go through this process, I encourage you to go to this page and browse through the information. First of all, it's illuminating as far as how our privacy is undermined through other search engines and what they do with our information and where it goes and how much they collect. DuckDuckGo is very clear on what they're collecting exactly here and I trust this particular document as being accurate. The second question I asked is, "How does DuckDuckGo make money?" I found a great post in what is the business model of site that I like to go to when I'm trying to figure out how online businesses earn revenue, and if I scroll down in this, we see the DuckDuckGo business model and they describe it in detail. Again, I will share this in the link in the description below, but essentially DuckDuckGo earns our money from search advertising and Affiliate revenue. Search advertising means that when you do a search that advertisers will post their search at the top of the search results just as it happens within the Google universe. So you're gonna be giving search results. We're going to be receiving search results as well as the organic results, which are often listed below, and the search results are demarked as ads. You can tell where their ads, the second place that they earn revenue is through Affiliate revenue, which we do actually here on this channel as well. If you click on a link to a retail site such as in Amazon or in eBay, if you make a purchase through the research that you've done in DuckDuckGo, provided you with the feedback on, then DuckDuckGo makes a small Affiliate fee and those two business models alone are enough to keep DuckDuck going and profitable at this point. Third question that I asked is, "Is DuckDuckGo as good as Google?" What are we giving up If we use DuckDuckGo. Again, great results which I have linked below. Search Engine Journal, one of my favorite sites for all things search engine related and in their article they have the pros and cons of using DuckDuckGo. Of course the pros are the privacy and they consider it to be a very clean and simple to use interface and that's growing in popularity. All good things, but now let's talk about the cons and they say straight up, "It's not as good as Google." It's a mom-and-pop version of a search engine. While Google is the premium gold standard. DuckDuckGo simply doesn't have the resources of a big long standing search engine but it's getting more every year and it's getting better and better as we go along. So that is really where the rubber meets the road for a lot of us. Do you need the most sophisticated search engine to find what you're looking for? In my own little tests that I've done between switching back and forth between Google and DuckDuckGo for the sort of searching that I do and I suspect the sort of searching that most of us do, I think you're gonna have just as good results from DuckDuckGo cause we're looking for fairly pedestrian and easy things to find. You're looking for a product, for a price, maybe you're looking for a recipe. The sort of searching that we all do, DuckDuckGo is very proficient at. It's when you get into the more sophisticated Boolean search type things where you're really diving in deep and in a research mode that you might find Google to be a far more efficient search engine. But the only way that you're gonna tell it, is to try it out for yourself and see how it works. And as I showed you at the beginning, it's pretty easy to switch back and forth between the two. So you could spend a week in Google, and a week in DuckDuckGo and make your determination yourself and then determine whether or not the benefit of privacy is with the slightly less efficient search engine that DuckDuckGo is. Now, I hope that you found this to be valuable. If you've not yet subscribed to Dotto Tech, I encourage you to do so. Subscribe to this channel and make sure that you ring the notification bell so that you hear when we upload any new videos. Also, I do wanna mention to you every week at Dotto Tech, we host a weekly tutorial webinar, which I think you might find fascinating. Again, there'll be links below to our webinar Wednesday series. They're free, and I encourage you to join us in some upcoming Wednesday. Till next time, I'm Steve Dotto. Have fun storming the castle.