- You are concerned about your privacy
and if you're not concerned about your privacy,
well you damn well should be.
Our privacy is under constant attack,
but we also are addicted to convenience and information.
When we want to look for something online,
we want to find it easily with small amount of effort
and the balancing act between our privacy
and convenience is a teeter totter
that goes back and forth.
Typically speaking though,
for the most part,
we're giving away something all of the time for convenience
and that is privacy
and the King of,
well, there's several Kings,
there's a whole Royal family of different organizations
that are scooping up our privacy.
With Facebook and Twitter and Google
right at the very top of that pyramid.
"Holy cow!" I'm mixing my metaphors.
But today we're gonna talk about one way
that you can recapture some of your privacy
without giving up too much convenience.
It has the very compelling name of DuckDuckGo.
That's today on Dotto Tech.
(air whooshing and upbeat music)
Steve Dotto here.
How the heck are you doing this fine day.
Today we're gonna have a conversation about privacy
and this is always a bit of a minefield
as we go through because
I teach you here on this channel,
how do you so many different tools
and many of those tools will invade our privacy
in a variety of different ways.
I'm a big fan of using Google's tools, Google's tool Suite,
but one of the things that Google does a lot
is they take a lot of information from us
and they utilize it in a variety of different ways.
It's up to us as much as possible to recognize
when we're giving up our privacy
and what is happening with that
and in a lot of cases we want
to claw back some of that privacy
and there is a way that we can claw back some of it
through the search engine that we choose.
Now, most of us choose the default certain change
and that's installed with our browser.
If we're using Chrome,
we're using Google search,
and there's good reason to use Google search
cause it's really, really good.
But, as you know from when you go
and do any search in Google,
that all of a sudden you're gonna be getting ads
that are relating to what you're searching on
and some people are comfortable with that.
Other people not so much.
Now, if you're not so much camp,
then an option that you have
is using a tool called DuckDuckGo as your search engine.
So today let's take a look at
how you go about changing search engines
and making DuckDuckGo your default search engine
and understanding a little bit about how that happens
and what happens when you do that.
Does that sound like a plan?
Alright, let's dive in.
Take a look at the DucDuckGo homepage,
which describes their philosophy
and their principles
and gives us access to their tool.
Now you can quickly do a search on DuckDuckGo
just by going to their homepage
without installing them in your browser
and not changing anything.
But most of us prefer to do all of our searching
from our omnibar, from our menu bar
within our web browser.
So we'll walk through that process as we go along.
But visiting the DuckDuckGo homepage,
we recognize that their big concern is
to deliver privacy for us.
And if you go through,
you can read through that.
You can add it to your browser
and browse as usual
and they will tell us here
that they won't store any personal information ever.
Then you go,
"Well, how do they make money then?"
Well they make money through
their advertising revenue by directly linking,
when you're doing a search to the ads sites
that are relevant for that particular search.
Not for some historical search,
which is one of the ways that Google and Facebook
and others make money,
but it's just based on that one search.
So they're not gonna follow us around with ads
after our initial search.
You will get relevant information when you search,
but it's the after that counts.
They don't track you in and out of private browsing mode.
They say here that other search engines track our searches.
Even when we're in private browsing mode.
That seems rather nasty and harsh, doesn't it?
And you can switch back to DuckDuckGo.
Now, there's a couple of ways
that you can implement DuckDuckGo.
They've got here the ability for you
to add it to the browser that you're in.
Now when you add it to the browser,
they're just gonna automate a simple process
that you can also do manually,
which I'm gonna show you right now.
Here's where and how our browsers use search engines.
Here in the top bar,
this is the search bar in Chrome,
they call it the omnibar because
it's doing more than search these days,
but that's typically where we go
in order to do a search.
Now, we can control what browser
this point's at for searching
or what service this points at for searching
by going into our preferences.
And this is gonna work for all browsers.
I'll quickly show it to you
and the other browsers after,
but here it is in Chrome.
I click right here on search engine
and here I can see that the search engine used
in the address bar is Google.
If I change it,
I have some presets loaded here,
I can change it to DuckDuckGo.
So if I changed it to DuckDuckGo,
watch what happens.
All I do is when I open a new tab,
look at what comes up.
DuckDuckGo as our homepage.
And you see here in the address bar
that DuckDuckGo appears here in the address bar.
So let's do a quick search
because we'll compare it with the Google search
because of course if it's not an accurate search,
if it doesn't deliver what we're looking for,
it doesn't do us much good then, does it?.
So I'm gonna do a quick search for a product
that I'm researching right now.
I'm looking at the RODECaster Pro.
I'm looking at this new,
it's a new audio interface.
And so there we see the search results coming up
and we see that we're getting results from Rode.
We're getting the results from B&H Photo,
which is a retail site,
another retail site here.
We're getting into some reviews of it
and we're getting some YouTube videos.
So we're getting some reasonable results.
And you can see here that DuckDuckGo also
has the same classifications
as we expect within Google search.
We can search the web,
we can also search for images.
And there we see lots of different images of it.
We can search for videos on it.
And here it's bringing up
a variety of different YouTube videos
where people are reviewing it
and looking at the product.
Any news-related stories about it.
Seven days ago there was a story in reverb.com.
The Next Web did a story but a long time,
so it hasn't been in the news an awful lot.
And we could also go into shopping,
which is gonna bring it up the direct sales site on Rode.
And I imagine we'll see Amazon links.
Yes, we see Amazon links at other links here.
So we're pretty much getting the same information
as we would if we were searching in Google.
Let's change, for argument's sake,
let's change our search engine back to Google
and let's open a new window.
Once again, I'm still in Chrome
and now see it's different.
Now it's opening the Google search page.
And when I searched for the RODECaster Pro here.
Here the results are a little bit more integrated
because here's one thing,
you see here on this side, the Evernote.
This is because my Evernote account actually links
to my Google account for search
and it searches my Evernote account at the same time.
So that speaks to some of the differences we see
and we just see that Google basically
formats the information differently.
But we see the same basic results.
We see the AVShop.
A little more localized for me here
because of Canadian retailers come up first.
But then we have B&H Photo
which came up at the top Rode,
came up at the very top
when we did the search
in Rode for the same things.
We saw the Canadian site first
and then Rode.
So just a slightly different order.
But the same basic information.
If we go through shopping is the next one.
And we're gonna see the same listings
in the shopping site.
And if we choose images,
we've got of course Google image search.
It's gonna show us all of the same kind of results.
So you're not really missing out a lot.
I think as far as accuracy goes,
that regardless of which tool you use,
you're probably going to find what you're looking for
using DuckDuckGo versus using Google.
So it comes down to how much extra privacy
you get as a result.
Now before I leave,
let's just jump quickly into Firefox.
I'm gonna open up Firefox cause I wanna show you
that the same principles apply in other browsers.
So I've got Firefox open here.
If I go into the Firefox preferences,
I see here that I have search
and if I go into search
I can choose what search engine
I want to use as my default search engine.
If I choose DuckDuckGo,
I can choose DuckDuckGo.
When I create a new tab,
you can see that the searching
is happening within DuckDuckGo
and actually says right here,
"That the search with DuckDuckGo is there."
And if we need extra proof,
if you're on a Mac,
if we go into Safari,
we open Safari,
we open Safari preferences
and we have the exact same options here.
Just slightly laid out slightly differently.
I already had DuckDuckGo chosen
as my primary search engine within Safari,
so you have the option within Safari
to search as well to change up
and use DuckDuckGo.
If you choose to as your main search engine,
pretty easy to get your head around using
and designating DuckDuckGo as your search engine.
But is it worth it?
I guess there's three questions that I have.
First of all,
"Is it really more private?"
Secondly, "How do they make money?"
I always wanna know
and be sure that I am not being hoodwinked
in some way in the revenue side.
And the third question is,
"What am I giving up?"
Is it an inferior search engine, search experience
to what I'm experiencing currently with Google.
What do you think, Farley, you interested in this too?
Farley seems interested in the topic as well.
Go sit there buddy.
(claps) All right,
so let's start with the first question which is privacy
and I think we're just gonna go straight
to the duck for that
and check what DuckDuckGo says.
We will put a link below,
but this is their privacy page
and they state right up front
and very firmly exactly what their position
is as far as our privacy.
If you are going to go through this process,
I encourage you to go to this page
and browse through the information.
First of all,
it's illuminating as far as how our privacy
is undermined through other search engines
and what they do with our information
and where it goes
and how much they collect.
DuckDuckGo is very clear on
what they're collecting exactly here
and I trust this particular document as being accurate.
The second question I asked is,
"How does DuckDuckGo make money?"
I found a great post
in what is the business model of site
that I like to go to when I'm trying
to figure out how online businesses earn revenue,
and if I scroll down in this,
we see the DuckDuckGo business model
and they describe it in detail.
Again, I will share this
in the link in the description below,
but essentially DuckDuckGo earns our money
from search advertising
and Affiliate revenue.
Search advertising means that
when you do a search that advertisers
will post their search at the top of the search results
just as it happens within the Google universe.
So you're gonna be giving search results.
We're going to be receiving search results
as well as the organic results,
which are often listed below,
and the search results are demarked as ads.
You can tell where their ads,
the second place that they earn revenue
is through Affiliate revenue,
which we do actually here on this channel as well.
If you click on a link
to a retail site such as in Amazon or in eBay,
if you make a purchase through the research
that you've done in DuckDuckGo,
provided you with the feedback on,
then DuckDuckGo makes a small Affiliate fee
and those two business models alone
are enough to keep DuckDuck going
and profitable at this point.
Third question that I asked is,
"Is DuckDuckGo as good as Google?"
What are we giving up If we use DuckDuckGo.
Again, great results which I have linked below.
Search Engine Journal, one of my favorite sites
for all things search engine related
and in their article
they have the pros and cons of using DuckDuckGo.
Of course the pros are the privacy
and they consider it to be a very clean
and simple to use interface
and that's growing in popularity.
All good things,
but now let's talk about the cons
and they say straight up,
"It's not as good as Google."
It's a mom-and-pop version of a search engine.
While Google is the premium gold standard.
DuckDuckGo simply doesn't have
the resources of a big long standing search engine
but it's getting more every year
and it's getting better and better as we go along.
So that is really where
the rubber meets the road for a lot of us.
Do you need the most sophisticated search engine
to find what you're looking for?
In my own little tests that I've done
between switching back and forth
between Google and DuckDuckGo
for the sort of searching that I do
and I suspect the sort of searching that most of us do,
I think you're gonna have
just as good results from DuckDuckGo
cause we're looking for fairly pedestrian
and easy things to find.
You're looking for a product, for a price,
maybe you're looking for a recipe.
The sort of searching that we all do,
DuckDuckGo is very proficient at.
It's when you get into
the more sophisticated Boolean search type things
where you're really diving in deep
and in a research mode
that you might find Google
to be a far more efficient search engine.
But the only way that you're gonna tell it,
is to try it out for yourself
and see how it works.
And as I showed you at the beginning,
it's pretty easy to switch back
and forth between the two.
So you could spend a week in Google,
and a week in DuckDuckGo
and make your determination yourself
and then determine whether
or not the benefit of privacy
is with the slightly
less efficient search engine that DuckDuckGo is.
Now, I hope that you found this to be valuable.
If you've not yet subscribed to Dotto Tech,
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Also, I do wanna mention
to you every week at Dotto Tech,
we host a weekly tutorial webinar,
which I think you might find fascinating.
Again, there'll be links below
to our webinar Wednesday series.
They're free, and I encourage you
to join us in some upcoming Wednesday.
Till next time,
I'm Steve Dotto.
Have fun storming the castle.