What’s it like using DuckDuckGo in 2019? (Privacy-focused search engine review)

You might have heard of DuckDuckGo in the past. Our first long post about it was back in 2016 with Rebecca Sentance trying out the new search engine for a week.

Three years later, many things have changed. More users are losing trust in big tech companies and privacy and security are more important than ever. How does DuckDuckGo fit in this change?

Over the last few months, DuckDuckGo has seen increased media coverage. Its growing stats among a growing conversation around online privacy make it more relevant than ever.

There are more than 30 million searches happening on DuckDuckGo every day. Its data indicates a constant growth. It’s currently the fourth largest search engine in the U.S. counting more than 1 billion searches every month all over the world.

Google is holding the reins of the market share with 88.5% of it, Bing is following with 6.12%, Yahoo! is third with 4.11% and DuckDuckGo is forthwith 0.99% of the market share.

It clearly has a long way to go to stand out as a serious competitor in the market share. However, it has already paved the way in a new kind of search engine that is serious about security and privacy. In fact, its mission is to set a new standard of trust online.

Whereas our business used to be all over the first 4 or 5 pages of results, we’ve pretty much disappeared because we cannot afford to buy AdWords or pay for ad campaigns.

Yesterday, I was just trying to quickly find out where I should drive to locally to get the best deal on a post hole digger. It used to be that Google was a useful tool for finding out this type of information. In the a person often got better results by searching for an item using a search term on Google with the name of the retailer than going to the retailer's web site and using the same search term.

I should have mentioned that using the same search term, (ace hardware post hole digger) on www.duckduckgo.com gave back appropriate results and didn't waste my time sorting through a bunch of inappropriate ads the way that Google did. To me it seems that Google is starting to become a victim of its own success. I do not know how long it will take, but people do eventually figure these things out and then other companies will develop niches that will start eating away at Google's dominance as a search provider.

Of course they provide other services that they provide that are hard to figure out how they are eventually going to make a profit from. We replaced our phone landline with a VOIP service provider about 20 years ago, almost as soon as cable internet became available. Initially the call quality was not quite as good as the landline, but we live in an outlying area and eliminating long distance charges was amazing. We eventually went to Vonage which had better quality and was more reliable than the provider we started with. Then Google started providing the same service with the same quality and reliability using a third party network adapter for free. So our phone bill went to zero. I still don't understand how this one pans out for them... there are no ads, it is full service and basically everything is free. Maybe their only goal is to dominate the VOIP industry? Some would point out that Google knows our landline calling history and might listen in on our calls, but I can't see how that would help them make a profit. It would consist mostly of phone solicitors bothering us and calls to and from a few friends and family members. I read that they have been losing money on the service for years... why do they keep doing it? Anyway, I am grateful to them for that freebee.

"It is routine that you search for a precise thing you KNOW exists 5, 6, or more times, changing what you enter and still wind up no closer."

Best solution I have found for this is to do an image search with the nearest search term I can think of. This usually gets me an idea of what most folks call a certain item. Then use that as a search term in regular text search (or shopping).

Absolute WORST search engine.....Amazon.. hands down. It is actually easier and more accurate to use Google with the added "Amazon" term.

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