What is DuckDuckGo and how it works

We’ll explain what DuckDuckGo is and how it works, the privacy-focused anonymous search engine that has grown year on year as a solid alternative to search engines like Google or Bing. Above all, an alternative for anyone who doesn’t want to be tracked and who wants to maximize privacy when searching the internet.

We will start by explaining DuckDuckGo what it is and how it works, and we will explain the main differences with Google. Among these differences is their Bang !, a powerful tool that we will finish by explaining to you with some practical examples.

What is DuckDuckGo and how it works

Duck Duck Go is one of the anonymous search engines and an alternative to the big names in the industry. The search engine you use on your web pages or directly in your browser if you have configured it. Google is a free search engine, and DuckDuckGo is an alternative that does not have many resources, but which has not stopped growing in recent years, and has already exceeded 1,000 million monthly searches.

The great strength of, as GoGoDuck is also called, compared to the main alternatives in the industry is that it aims to offer the maximum possible privacy to its users. This means that they do not collect information during searches, which means that the search results are not personalized based on your history or preferences.

Going into the technical aspects, this private search engine is written in Perl code, uses an Nginx web server and runs mainly on FreeBSD. Furthermore, we can consider it as a hybrid search engine, since in addition to using its own crawler it also uses the APIs of the main search engines on the Internet.

This means that when you search for something in this engine the results that are shown have been obtained in two ways. For one thing, DuckDuckGo has its own crawler called DuckDuckBot, which crawls the internet by picking up web pages. But on the other hand, it also gets results from around 400 different sources, including search engines like Bing or Yahoo and services like Wikipedia.

And if it doesn’t collect your data, how does it make money? Well, as simple as running ads through Microsoft or Yahoo’s ad networks, as well as an affiliate marketing system and partnerships with companies like Amazon or eBay.

It shows advertisements in your searches, even if it does so without tracking you or confusing the ads to make you click on them. It is somewhat workable considering that this is an engine run by a relatively small team.

What makes it different from Google

Go Go Duck, as it is called by some internet users, has some rather important differences compared to other search engines such as Google. For starters, it does not store its users’ IP address or save any information related to it. Only information related to the keywords used is stored.

This means that DuckDuckGo doesn’t have the ability to customize the results. This can be positive or negative depending on your preferences, but it means that all users receive the same search results when they search for the same terms.

The search engine Duck Search also does not share user search data with the web pages they visit through search results. Come on, if you enter a page through DuckDuckGo, it won’t know what terms you used in the search engine to access it.

In general, when you do a search on most commercial search engines, even if you do it in the private mode that most have, the criteria you used in the searches are stored for the use of the search engine. and are also shared with the pages that are visited. This is what DuckDuckGo doesn’t share with them. They will know that you entered their website, but not how you found them.

DuckDuckGo will automatically force the HTTPS encrypted version of a website as well, using Firefox’s HTTPS Everywhere plug-in also used by services like TOR Browser.

Normally this is forced internally in the browsers themselves, and although it is an increasingly common practice, DuckDuckGo forces it at the search engine level in case you are using a browser that does not.

Finally, DuckDuckGo ** doesn’t store your search history either. This means that there is no timeline with everything you searched for and they cannot use it to personalize your results nor can they provide it to law enforcement in case they need it for an investigation. In addition, it also helps that your search habits cannot be used by third parties.

Yes, DuckDuckGo saves searches that are made in its search engine, but it does so without identifiers that help you know who is doing them. The goal of saving these searches is simply to improve results when someone misspelled or misspelled specific search terms.

But of course, while both services are almost the same in search, Google has an ecosystem of services that DuckDuckGo lacks, and this can always be a point in favor of the most used search engine in the world.

While to be honest, DuckDuckGo doesn’t even want to be Google, it just tries to be an alternative for those who want to maximize their privacy.

If we refer to Google strictly as a search engine, DuckDuckGo does more or less the same as Google. The user types what they want to search for, presses a button, and gets the search results. However, although they are similar, the search results and their order are different. DuckDuckGo uses a slightly different search method and uses its own algorithms, so it’s normal for the results not to be the same.

If we refer to the rest of the services that Google offers, DuckDuckGo obviously falls short of the tech giant. But it doesn’t mean. DuckDuckGo wants to help internet users protect their personal information, not only using their search engine but also from apps and extensions that protect privacy outside the internet.

To complement the lack of a native ecosystem of services, this search engine DuckDuckGo includes a command system for using third-party services which it calls Bang. It is a command that starts with an exclamation point and is used to search for things in specific places.