Since the NSA PRISM surveillance program leak larger tech companies like Google, Microsoft, and Facebook are under a trust crisis. Lots of users are under the impression that these sites aren’t safe enough, even though they have stringent privacy policies. Hence, many are looking for alternatives.
The most notable shift can be seen in the search engine scene. The so-called “private search engine” DuckDuckGo has seen really big boost in search traffic. On June 17 the search engine recorded 3 million searches for the first time. The trend is continuing.
DuckDuckGo, launched in 2008, took nearly 4 years to reach 1 million searches, and nearly 1 year and 4 months more to reach 2 million searches. Thanks to the PRISM scandal, it took just 8 more days to reach 3 million searches. The traffic growth can be tracked here.
The numbers are really scant compared to Google’s 1 billion+ searches per day. But don’t underestimate the rising concern among users about their privacy.
The question is, however, are they really secure in the hands of DuckDuckGo? The search engine doesn’t track users and serve ads based on context. And here is the twist. These ads are currently handled by Bing Ads, a platform who the users are trying to avoid.
Thanks to: Search Engine Watch
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Ixquick is much more private, and provides better results.