With NSA and Edward Snowden in the headlines, it's enough to make any user of the Internet think twice about online security and wonder if they are being monitored. A Google search seems harmless enough, but the reality is that you could be putting your information at risk when browsing through a site that harvests your information for advertisers.
With NSA and Edward Snowden in the headlines, it's enough to make any user of the Internet think twice about online security and wonder if they are being monitored. A Google search seems harmless enough, but the reality is that you could be putting your information at risk when browsing through a site that harvests your information for advertisers.
Users are flocking away from Google to newer search engines such as DuckDuckGo which allow for anonymous online browsing. These sites boast a stringent Privacy Policy stating they refuse to track users or skew search results based on collected information.
DuckDuckGo was founded in September of 2008. Hiring their first employee about three years later, it certainly took awhile for the search company to get off the ground, but by May of 2012 they were responsible for about 1.5 million search queries every day. This is obviously incomparable to Google's figures, which haven't been that low since 1999, however Google explicitly named them as a competitor in 2012 when it was accused of being a monopoly.
Revalations about the NSA's PRISM program did a lot to improve traffic. Once information hit the public that virtually all of digital communications are being tracked, traced and data-based, DuckDuckGo's traffic began to increase exponentially. On January 7th 2014, they had their biggest day yet at 4,452,957 queries in a 24-hour period.
People in the tech industry are seeing the potential for sites like DuckDuckGo to gain traction and challenge the search leviathan, which is no small task given Google claims to be responsible for over 1 trillion searches every year. DuckDuckGo isn't trying to take Google's place, but the start-up enterprise is happy to offer an alternative to those who want privacy when it comes to their search engine.
We're pretty serious about online security at NTG. If you want advice on how to protect yourself and your employees from the nasty bits of the Internet, we'd love to talk to you. We're experts in data security.
