At DuckDuckGo, we do not collect or share any personal information. That’s our privacy policy in a nutshell. For example, we do not store IP addresses, and we do not create unique cookies. As such, we do not even have the ability to create search histories or search sessions for any individual – privacy by design.
At the same time, we need a way to reliably improve our products for our users in an anonymous way. There are a few methods we’ve developed to achieve this.
Spoiler alert: it doesn’t involve collecting user data.
My only nitpick is that its slow.
Move to a part of the world were Internet is slow and it will feel as fast as the others.
I never really noticed a difference between it and google, but then again I think Duck Duck Go has servers relatively close to me, which may not be the case for everyone here.
If you open up developer console and run a query, what is the “load” time for you during a query?
For google…
DOMConentLoaded: 759ms
Load: 2.38s
For DDG…
DOMConentLoaded: 730ms
Load: 3.86s
I’ve built websites that are faster than either of them to be honest
(nowhere near their traffic levels obviously)
Bing…
DOMContentLoaded: 529ms
Load: 573ms
Osnews….
DOMContentLoaded: 1.60s
Load: 22.01s
Osnews seems to stall while loading 3rd party resources.
(this one in particular cdn.optkit.com/assets/widget/widget.js)
Though OSNews is perfectly usable before those resources fully load.
zima,
Yes, Google and DDG are also usable before they are fully loaded too, which is good because their full load times aren’t great either. On osnews, I don’t know what “widget.js” is supposed to provide but it really ought to be fixed since every single page has this issue. It’s ironic that the CDN is less reliable than the main site.
Edited 2018-11-16 23:36 UTC
YES BUT DO THEY DO EVIL?