After reading Dainel Filho's post: Por que estou deixando o Google? on his blog, I decided to try it out and see what happens, turns out that since then I'm still using the duck (2015) and never thought about switch back to Google.
Duck Duck Go is now quite popular but some people have negative comments or reactions when they face it:
- Your Google is weird / different / new?
- What Google is this?
- Oh! Look at him, he doesn't use Google.
- No Google, but has a Gmail. Ok.
That said, I'll try to sumarize the reason why I decided to left Alphabet's search engine for good.
Reason 1 - Decentralizing the information
In general, most companies and individuals already use google and - obviously - Alphabet gets the collected data to address any commercial decisions. Anybody in their shoes would do the same, but that's not the point.
The point is: we make really easier to them when we choose to concede this data monopoly, and I'm not saying that we're giving away our privacy because in exchange we are receiving their excelent services and, of course, everybody said yes to the terms of service and agreement (how could you say no to that?).
But, let's rationalize this, the world has more than eight billion human beings, let's say that half of that has a computer with an internet connection. So, can you imagine four billion people giving at every second any kind of data? And, can you imagine that they're doing it to a single entity? For sure, underneath all that, there are ciphers and noise to be ignored, but cutting this off, the amount of information is certainly huge and we - the givers - are not aware of this particular size.
According to this article produced by Princenton University, 75% of the most visited websites around the globe has Google's trackers, Facebook comes next with 25%.
Scientia potentia est, information is power, let's not forget it. In my opinion, using other providers than Google or Facebook, we can decentralize the information.
Reason 2 - Don't bubble
There is what is known by filter bubble, created by Eli Pariser in his book The Filter Bubble: What The Internet Is Hiding From You. It's quite interesting and eye-opening his presentation about this. For short, filtering bubble is a mechanism that uses some pre-collected pieces of information of someone to get better results to next search, taking advantage of a context.
To illustrate this, let's imagine you want to buy the better coffee around and doesn't know who is selling it, so you go to your neighbors and asks them. So, they decide that you don't want or don't have a way to go far to achieve that and based on that they recommend a good place next to you. But, what if your neighbors have told you about another place that's 45 minutes away from you but has the most delicious coffee ever?
Yes, Google and Facebook have implemented the bubble and they rely on it to give you what they think "better results" are. O DuckDuckGo doesn't.
Reason 3 - Superior features
Well, in my opinion and for my suprise, DuckDuckGo has better features than Google.
Instant answers
They are easy utilities to use when you're searching, giving some keyword the result will be on the spotlight. Here is the full list, but I listed above some of them:
- time
- stopwatch
- timer
- alarm
- define metaphor
- wheater Tokyo
- 1 usd to eur, 1m to ft, 225 days to minutes, 1 cup to ml
- color teal, color tomato
- password strong 16
Bangs
These are shortcuts that allow us to search over a provider directly, there are more than eleven thousands search engines available here (Google is included, see the full list) the only thing you need to do is write an abbreviation and an exclamation point next.
Conclusion
That's it, I'm sure after using DuckDuckGo for a while, you will find yourself on a safe, powerful and delightful experience as I did when a switched to it.
By the way, duck's name is Dax!
