If we take into account the hundreds of millions of daily queries that Google receives as a web search engine, we can firmly state that it is by far the most used engine ( 96% since January 2016 ). But as we all know, Google is more than just a search engine, as it offers a large volume of “free services” made available to Internet users with one requirement: having an account.
In this way, in exchange for our personal data, Google provides new zealand phone number data the user with services such as a “Gmail” email account, a “Calendar” calendar, the possibility of creating blogs through “Blogger”, having our own YouTube channel, web analytics for companies with “Analytics”, etc. Other services can even be used without registration, such as the search engine itself, the image search engine, the translator, “Google Maps”, etc.
But in addition to Google, there are other search engines such as Bing , formerly known as Live Search, Windows Live Search and MSN Search, which belongs to Microsoft, offering Microsoft services such as Outlook email or an online suite of the Office package, of course, in exchange for a series of personal data that are an essential requirement for creating an account. The same occurs with the Yahoo! browser , with its email service or its Flickr image community. These are services that require registration in exchange for being able to use them.
When creating an account in any of these services, it is necessary to accept their privacy policy. At that moment, we make available to the company that provides the service a series of personal data entered in their registration forms, but in addition, these companies collect other types of information of which we are not aware, such as location, search history, cookies, number of emails sent by their email service, etc.
Under the motto of “improving the user experience”, this type of information is collected to establish, among other things, user profiles. To do this, they cross-reference usage data from different buying and selling platforms, searches, etc., for advertising purposes only. Thus, when a company wants to advertise on a search engine, a user profile can be associated with it in accordance with the advertiser, which will display advertising created especially for that potential buyer.
Since our goal is to protect our privacy as much as possible and prevent an organization from knowing too much about our interests and preferences, we think it is interesting to know that other search engines can be used that do not collect personal information of any kind.
DuckDuckGo follows this line , with a philosophy of use that represents a completely different ideology from that of Google, as it is a search engine that advocates privacy: it will neither collect personal information that identifies a user, nor share it with anyone.
You can also use Google from DuckDuckGo by typing !g followed by your search terms, with the added benefit that you won't be tracked. This is because it has the ability to use so-called Bangs, which are a series of commands that allow us to include external features in the search engine (such as the aforementioned !g to use Google's search engine, !yt followed by search terms to search YouTube, !fb to do so on Facebook, !tw for Twitter, etc., or a more recent !WL to search WikiLeaks).
