Privacy focused search engines (still) on the rise
When Snowden revealed the massive spying program of the NSA back in 2013, Internet users started to turn to privacy focused search engines.
Search engines like DuckDuckGo or Startpage saw a jump in user traffic after the leaking of the data. While still just a tiny fraction of the traffic that the behemoth Google Search gets, or its main competitor Bing Search, it is clear that more and more users are using search engines that promise better privacy for some or even all of the searches they run.
The rise did not come out of nowhere though. Both DuckDuckGo and Startpage tap into the data of bigger search engines, Bing and Google, and while that is limiting somewhat as they have to deal with whatever data they get, search results are for the most part similar to what users get when they run searches on Google or Bing directly.
The core difference is however that users are not tracked when they run searches.
We looked at how well DuckDuckGo and Startpage are doing back in 2015 for the last time. Back then, both search engines did quite well and saw a noticeable increase in traffic year over year.
If you look at data provided by Alexa, a company that Amazon bought years ago that tracks website popularity among other things, you will notice that privacy focused search engines continue to do well.
DuckDuckGo broke into the top 400 sites this year globally for instance, while it sat in the top 800 sites a year ago. Startpage too went from a global rank around 3000 to 1249 in a year, and newcomer Searx rose more than halved its rank to position 195,000 now.
Both DuckDuckGo and Startpage publish traffic information that are publicly available. DuckDuckGo's traffic continues to rise and sites at about 16,700,000 average direct requests per day. One year ago, the average number of direct requests was 11,100,000 which means that requests increased by about a third in a year's time.
Tips:
- 10 Quick tips to improve StartPage Search further
- 5 DuckDuckGo Features That You May Not Know about Yet
- DuckDuckGo: another bag of tricks to get the most out of it
- Five Startpage Tips to improve your search experience
- How To Improve Your DuckDuckGo Search Experience
- Use the Startpage Proxy to browse websites anonymously
Closing Words
It is good to see that privacy focused search engines continue to do well. In fact, I'm a bit puzzled why they don't do a lot better considering that privacy is still one of the hot topics on the Internet and even in traditional media.
Is it because these search engines are known only to a small subset of people, because of convenience and the fact that most tracking happens without user knowledge in the background, or because of technical or functional reasons?
Now You: What's your take on this?
Doesn’t Windows 8 know that www. or http:// are passe ?
Well it is a bit difficulty to distinguish between name.com domains and files for instance.
I know a service made by google that is similar to Google bookmarks.
http://www.google.com/saved
@Ashwin–Thankful you delighted my comment; who knows how many “gamers” would have disagreed!
@Martin
The comments section under this very article (3 comments) is identical to the comments section found under the following article:
https://www.ghacks.net/2023/08/15/netflix-is-testing-game-streaming-on-tvs-and-computers/
Not sure what the issue is, but have seen this issue under some other articles recently but did not report it back then.
Omg a badge!!!
Some tangible reward lmao.
It sucks that redditors are going to love the fuck out of it too.
With the cloud, there is no such thing as unlimited storage or privacy. Stop relying on these tech scums. Purchase your own hardware and develop your own solutions.
This is a certified reddit cringe moment. Hilarious how the article’s author tries to dress it up like it’s anything more than a png for doing the reddit corporation’s moderation work for free (or for bribes from companies and political groups)
Almost al unlmited services have a real limit.
And this comment is written on the dropbox article from August 25, 2023.
First comment > @ilev said on August 4, 2012 at 7:53 pm
For the God’s sake, fix the comments soon please! :[
Yes. Please. Fix the comments.
With Google Chrome, it’s only been 1,500 for some time now.
Anyone who wants to force me in such a way into buying something that I can get elsewhere for free will certainly never see a single dime from my side. I don’t even know how stupid their marketing department is to impose these limits on users instead of offering a valuable product to the paying faction. But they don’t. Even if you pay, you get something that is also available for free elsewhere.
The algorithm has also become less and less savvy in terms of e.g. English/German translations. It used to be that the bot could sort of sense what you were trying to say and put it into different colloquialisms, which was even fun because it was like, “I know what you’re trying to say here, how about…” Now it’s in parts too stupid to translate the simplest sentences correctly, and the suggestions it makes are at times as moronic as those made by Google Translations.
If this is a deep-learning AI that learns from users’ translations and the phrases they choose most often – which, by the way, is a valuable, moneys worthwhile contribution of every free user to this project: They invest their time and texts, thereby providing the necessary data for the AI to do the thing as nicely as they brag about it in the first place – alas, the more unprofessional users discovered the translator, the worse the language of this deep-learning bot has become, the greater the aggregate of linguistically illiterate users has become, and the worse the language of this deep-learning bot has become, as it now learns the drivel of every Tom, Dick and Harry out there, which is why I now get their Mickey Mouse language as suggestions: the inane language of people who can barely spell the alphabet, it seems.
And as a thank you for our time and effort in helping them and their AI learn, they’ve lowered the limit from what was once 5,000 to now 1,500…? A big “fuck off” from here for that! Not a brass farthing from me for this attitude and behaviour, not in a hundred years.
When will you put an end to the mess in the comments?
Ghacks comments have been broken for too long. What article did you see this comment on? Reply below. If we get to 20 different articles we should all stop using the site in protest.
I posted this on [https://www.ghacks.net/2023/09/28/reddit-enforces-user-activity-tracking-on-site-to-push-advertising-revenue/] so please reply if you see it on a different article.
Comment redirected me to [https://www.ghacks.net/2012/08/04/add-search-the-internet-to-the-windows-start-menu/] which seems to be the ‘real’ article it is attached to
Comment redirected me to [https://www.ghacks.net/2012/08/04/add-search-the-internet-to-the-windows-start-menu/] which seems to be the ‘real’ article it is attached to
Article Title: Reddit enforces user activity tracking on site to push advertising revenue
Article URL: https://www.ghacks.net/2023/09/28/reddit-enforces-user-activity-tracking-on-site-to-push-advertising-revenue/
No surprises here. This is just the beginning really. I cannot see a valid reason as to why anyone would continue to use the platform anymore when there are enough alternatives fill that void.
I’m not sure if there is a point in commenting given that comments seem to appear under random posts now, but I’ll try… this comment is for https://www.ghacks.net/2023/09/28/reddit-enforces-user-activity-tracking-on-site-to-push-advertising-revenue/
My temporary “solution”, if you can call it that, is to use a VPN (Mullvad in my case) to sign up for and access Reddit via a European connection. I’m doing that with pretty much everything now, at least until the rest of the world catches up with GDPR. I don’t think GDPR is a magical privacy solution but it’s at least a first step.