PART V ON THE NETPRAETOR.COM OVERVIEW OF THE NINE MAIN CATEGORIES OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY WHICH HAVE THE MOST IMPACT ON END USER DATA PRIVACY AND DATA SECURITY THROUGH DAILY USE.
Private Search Engines
Across devices and operating systems, much of the worlds online activity is funneled through just a few channels known as search engines. The best analogy for search engines can be understood by fans of the Marvel Cinematic Universe Thor movies or comic books. Think of search engines as the character Heimdall the gatekeeper, his character has visibility into the universe and nothing passes by his line of sight without noticing. Queries into search engines function the same way and nothing escapes their line of sight.
Boil it all down and Google leads the way with roughly two thirds of all search queries, while Bing picks up most of the remaining third of global traffic. Of the small percentage of search engine market share remaining, there is a handful of search engines competing in that space. Former search engine leader Yahoo, along with Dogpile, StartPage and DuckDuckGo, along with many others all operate in this limited space.
Search Engine Competition
From this crowded and small slice of the search engine pie come the two NETPRAETOR recommended private search engines, DuckDuckGo, and StartPage. Of these two private search engines DuckDuckGo has the potential to actually breakout out of this limited space and compete with Bing in terms of search query volume. Part of their success has come from a major endorsement by Apple as part of their privacy awareness campaign. Additionally, DuckDuckGo is more than just a search engine, they are actively educating people about data security and data privacy with their own data privacy campaign.
DuckDuckGo
Instead of monetizing an individuals entire online activity through user identifiable tracking across websites and search queries like Google. DuckDuckGo does not track users across websites or search queries, nor do they retain user identifiable information. DuckDuckGo simply serves their users ads based off of each unique search query while maintaining user anonymity. As more and more individuals realize the value of maintaining their online privacy, DuckDuckGo has the potential to change the way search engines make money to the benefit of end user privacy.
StartPage
For individuals who have been using Google as their primary search engine for many years StartPage is a great alternative. This search engine actually sources their queries from Google and produces their results with all of Google’s tracking elements removed. They can be summed up as a Google proxy service and achieve it by paying Google to remove the trackers. Like DuckDuckGo they monetize in other ways that don’t involve profiling and storing data on their users while advocating for privacy rights.
2 Private Search Engines That Don’t Follow You Around?
Using private search engines like StartPage and DuckDuckGo combined with other NETPRAETOR recommendations can go a long way towards improving data privacy and data security.
Do you think these are two of the best private search engines? Leave your comments below.
