We stumbled upon DuckDuckGo while we poured over our analytics from Google. As a marketing company, we want the analytics we deliver to clients as spot on as possible and want to filter out all spam referrals because spam gives us false numbers. After digging further into analytics and searching the web, we found out the truth about DuckDuckGo.
What is Duck Duck Go?
What we’ve learned about DuckDuckGo is that it is a search engine that places a lot of emphasis on the privacy of the user.
Think searching Google while incognito or Safari in private.
The difference between DuckDuckGo and the rest of the search engines out there is that you don’t have to go into “hiding” to search. DuckDuckGo automatically hides you aka doesn’t track you.
From DuckDuckGo:
- They do not store your personal information. Ever. Their privacy policy states that they simply do not collect or share any of your personal information.
- They do not follow you around with ads. They don’t store your search history so they have nothing to sell to advertisers that track you across the internet.
- For other search engines, whether you are browsing in private mode or out of private they track you. DuckDuckGo doesn’t track you at all.
The marketing standpoint vs the consumer standpoint
From a marketing standpoint, we prosper and thrive on data that we get from analytics and consumer information that is provided to us. We can see trends where a specific consumer is going for a specific product or even watch what might be the next big thing from the information we receive. A search engine like DuckDuckGo should have us shaking in our shoes because without the consumer data, we have to step back to a time where that data is cultivated by hand and not some handy code built in the background of a search engine. We crave so much data that sometimes we forget that some people just want privacy.
From a consumer standpoint, we, as humans, understand the need for privacy. In the day and age of everything digital with apps that run in the background spitting out your location to a server or search engines letting some big name brand know you one time searched for a product of theirs that now shows up on the sidebar of Facebook, we think 1984. George Orwell was right. “Big brother is watching us” and while we are a far cry from a dystopian society, we do have omnipresent government surveillance and manipulation of the media. Our privacy is invaded unless we click a box buried in the terms & conditions, do “privacy checks”, and more. Most could care less who’s tracking their searches and some want to search privately. If you fall into the latter, we think DuckDuckGo could be good for you.