If you are one of the fools who believed that an informal corporate motto as dull as “Don’t do evil” would keep Google from going nuts and starting to pile up tons of info about our “surfing habits”, keep reading. Are you tired of seeing “Visit Istanbul” ads just because you searched “kebab” using the popular search engine based in Mountain View. Tired of those "Pick the President" ads after Googling your favorite potential presidential candidate? Well, mighty pirates, we have got a solution for you, and that solution is called duckduckgo. Yes, there are still margins for competitions in the search engine industry and Gabriel Weinberg, the guy behind the project, managed to get his privacy-respectful search engine to the public.
We are so happy with duckduckgo that this is one of our "go to" search engines here at I Heart Ubuntu. It has a simple splash page with just a button (yep, mr. Weinberg didn’t implement the silly “I’m feeling lucky”) which will yield a wonderful white and minimalistic result page. Duck Duck Go makes use of crowd-sourced websites like Wikipedia, other projects like Wolfram Alpha and Yahoo! and also the very personal crawling bot of duckduckgo.
According to Alexia duckduckgo is enjoying a steady growth in visits and searches and it could become in a few months a serious competitor in the corporation-crowded market of search engines.
As for the license, duckduck go is not GPL, yet. It seems that the boss has some projects about going free software and we would be really happy to see the first functional and open source search engine of human history.
Give it a try, and if you don’t mind about your privacy, well, it’s time to start being more aware of what the Big Guys of the Internets™ are doing with our data and surfing habits.
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