Two years ago I wrote about DuckDuckGo, my search engine of choice on all devices, reaching 12M daily active searches. They are still growing. Gabriel Weinberg:
We are proud to say that at the end of last year, we surpassed a cumulative count of 10 billion anonymous searches served, with over 4 billion in 2016! We are growing faster than ever with our first 14M day on Jan 10, 2017.
I like that DDG is anonymous. But I don’t use them because I’m paranoid that Google is tracking my searches. If I cared that much I’d have to stop using Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and also turn off cookies and tracking pixels and blah blah blah. In fact, I use Google Chrome and store my entire web history (and use Google to sync that across devices) so they know what my DDG searches are and the pages I click on in those results. I’m simply not that paranoid.
I use DDG because I believe monopolies aren’t good. Bing, Yahoo!, DDG, all deserve their fair shot at being better than Google at any number of things such as relevance, speed, usability, and privacy. DDG is the best way to search if you care about privacy. But they also have great features like Instant Answers and !bangs.
If you’re using Google why not give DDG or Bing a try? Maybe you’ll like them better.