Google tracks you. We don't. An illustrated guide

The first sentence when I stripped out the pictures was "When you search Google, and click on a link, your search term is sent to that site, along with your browser &#38; computer info, which can often uniquely identify you."<p>Referrers are a part of the way the web has worked since before Google existed. They're a browser-level feature more than something related to specific websites. But if referrers bother you, just use the SSL version of Google to prevent referrers from being sent to http sites (or change your browser not to send referrers at all).<p>The corresponding sentence even for a website that strips referrers would be "When you search on domain X, and click on a link, your browser &#38; computer info is sent to that site, which can often uniquely identify you."<p>Read more carefully in that light, the first sentence is really saying that third-party sites that you land on after searching or visiting a domain can track you. That's independent of whether you came from Google or any other search engine, of course.

Or, you could use <a href="https://encrypted.google.com" rel="nofollow">https://encrypted.google.com</a> which disables the referral[1]. You can also turn off the history[2].<p>Other info, like your IP address (which they partially anonymize after... 9/18/24 months (conflicting details)) and cookie[3] (which you can clear / block), is still stored. Odds are DDG does this too (edit: they don't, see replies), as it's mostly useful for overall statistics.<p>[1]: <a href="http://www.google.com/support/websearch/bin/answer.py?answer=173733" rel="nofollow">http://www.google.com/support/websearch/bin/answer.py?answer...</a> [2]: <a href="http://www.google.com/support/accounts/bin/answer.py?answer=54067" rel="nofollow">http://www.google.com/support/accounts/bin/answer.py?answer=...</a> [3]: <a href="http://www.google.com/privacy/faq.html#toc-terms-server-logs" rel="nofollow">http://www.google.com/privacy/faq.html#toc-terms-server-logs</a>

There is a rash of this kind of marketing I see cropping up on Hacker News, marketing which promotes one company while badmouthing another. We saw it from Posterous, Adioso, and now DuckDuckGo.<p>* Adioso vs. Bing: <a href="http://blog.adioso.com/sorry-bing-adioso-is-still-the-worlds-only-na" rel="nofollow">http://blog.adioso.com/sorry-bing-adioso-is-still-the-worlds...</a><p>* Posterous vs. Tumblr (and others): <a href="http://blog.posterous.com/hey-tumblr-users-got-comments-want-video-grad" rel="nofollow">http://blog.posterous.com/hey-tumblr-users-got-comments-want...</a><p>Setting aside whether or not you want to be perceived as cutthroat or just straight-up douchey, the real question is whether or not this the most effective spin.<p>I think it might be better just to talk about how great privacy is at DuckDuckGo, perhaps in comparison to other search engines in general.<p>DDG calling out Google individually, Adioso calling out Bing individually, or in the case of Posterous, calling out other startups, isn't how I would play the game.

That site turned me off. I am using DDG as my primary search engine for many months now.<p>I really dislike the style and "atmosphere" of that site. The images are seemingly unordered and could use some borders. The images of the dog biting the women or the predator disgust me. Then some "motivationals" and memes that do not help the case.<p>This site gave me mental stress (the left-alignment of varied sized text and images maybe, maybe the white, maybe the images) and overall broke a chunk off the good impression the DDG creator gave me so far. I'd suggest either not making such weird site or at least make it properly designed.<p>(When I clicked the link I expected it to be related to the <a href="http://hackademix.net/2010/12/28/x-do-not-track-support-in-noscript/" rel="nofollow">http://hackademix.net/2010/12/28/x-do-not-track-support-in-n...</a> disaster which dramatically "uniquifies" your browser fingerprint so I started with a bad feeling. Thanks for adding ad-blocking recommendations though! And even more so: Tor!)

I think it's some valid info here, and it's certainly worth being wary of the info Google collects, but I also sense a little bit of FUD here. The whole "...which can often uniquely identify you" makes me feel like this is playing on fear a little too much. It's not like that "big ebony booty" search is going to come up in a job interview any time soon guys.

Here goes some feedback, hopefully we can gather some suggestions for Gabriel instead of saying 'Encrypted Google' all the time...<p>In my opinion (using my designer side) the site lacks basic design, the text is well written, and the images make it really easy to read, but its missing some eye candy. Something to do would be structure each argument as a page/slide, and make the reading more like slides or a book.<p>In my opinion, -quite ironic- you should have a look (copy format) from Google's 20thingsilearned [1], the book format, with the beautiful design and the animations would make the site stand out and more attractive to be read than it is now.<p>But dont do as them, there is a pretty good job done keeping the text short and concise but informative and clear.<p>If the site is kept well formatted as well as structured and 'playful' will continue to be a pleasure to read.<p>Good luck with the campaign, happy to help to my default search engine :)<p>[1] <a href="http://www.20thingsilearned.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.20thingsilearned.com/</a>

Well, that finally worked for me. For the longest time I've seen the DDG "ads" on here and thought, "meh, Google works fine for me." Focusing on the privacy angle appealed to me, mainly because I like the idea of decoupling my search and email histories.<p>But - if you are so focused on <i>not-tracking</i> then how do you know if an advertising campaign such as this actually works? Presumably this is not the only campaign you are currently running. Must be the referrer string from donttrack.us, which is so amusingly ironic that I can't help but twist the corner of my mouth into a smirk.<p>Nice site, by the way, I found it clean, clear and readable. Scrolling and justification are no matter to me, I liked the simple single-page look.

I've been using Duck Duck Go as my primary search for the last month - it's pretty great! And if you need to fallback to google because you want a map or something else there are a bunch of ! shortcuts to go right there. (!map is most frequently used by me)

I have a question: does this policy of DDG violate their legal responsibilities? Thats a serious question. I believe that law enforcement requires some form of data retention but I'm not sure what.

I switched definitely to duckduckgo one month ago and I'm happy about it. I find that for us, tech-oriented people, it provides very pertinent result pages, plus it is fast enough, and you can always !google or !wikipedia or else if not satisfied... Its recall is perhaps less than Google, but the smart handling of "spam" gives it a really nice precision. Never went on page 2!

As a practical matter, surfing from an <a href="https://" rel="nofollow">https://</a> URL doesn't strictly strip referrers (in Google, DDG, or otherwise). SSL is intended to hide your data from the network, not the destination, so every browser I've tested will send referrers from <a href="https://SiteA.com/" rel="nofollow">https://SiteA.com/</a> to <a href="https://SiteB.com/" rel="nofollow">https://SiteB.com/</a> as long as both the referring and destination URLs are both <a href="https://" rel="nofollow">https://</a>

I'm sure google is not as "evil" as those recent bashing campaigns tend to insinuate, but the fact is, if google could publish clearer, more-defined data-privacy or data-retention policies instead of the vague assertions you can find in their TOS, things would be clearer. The current situation is just feeding doubts, and nothing serious or accompanied by hard facts comes to contradict this illustrated guide

Strangely enough, and with all the anti-google hype lately, this really makes me want to ditch google for web searches (Gmail is harder to leave...)

Kudos to DDG. Finally a good alternative to the big G.<p>What scares me the most sometimes is when I think about how ubiquitous Google's ads network and analytics network are. Most of the websites I visit use AdSense and/or Google Analytics. Some are using Google's copy of popular javascript libraries like jQuery. This means that when you are moving from site A to site B to site C, there is a good chance that even though A or B or C does not know about it, Google knows your full browsing path and even how you move from one to another. I am not saying that Google is actually doing it, but it is scary someone has the capability to do it and to know more about you than the government and your mother do. It is important a significant portion of the website and our browsing activities are outside of Google's networks.

I love DDG, and am a DDG user. Nevertheless there are two things in this guide that bothered me: i) No Referrers: I consider this to be essential information for the webmaster. It allows him to know what is working, and what isn't. If DDG becomes popular, it will kill the search analytics market. It's a niche product right now, and that's why it can afford to do this and Google can't (SSL isn't the default option).<p>ii) Adblock et all: By advising users to use Adblock, once again you are encouraging users to do something that can cripple the web as we know it.

You know what? I'm one of those people that can probably say "who cares", but I think I'm going to try out DuckDuckGo over the upcoming week.

I've been using DDG for a while, and have been very happy with it. IMHO they should focus on this privacy aspect, trying to be the most privacy respecting search engine, because it's a key product differentiator and it's also an issue which is only likely to grow in importance.

In case you're wondering how uniquely identifiable your browser is: <a href="https://panopticlick.eff.org/" rel="nofollow">https://panopticlick.eff.org/</a>. "Your browser fingerprint appears to be unique among the 1,328,173 tested so far."<p><i>Of course, this is regardless of Google.</i>

Could anyone comment on how much of this stuff could be sidestepped by just using an incognito window in Chrome? I don't mind ads targeted to, say, me as a Java developer. But, if I'm going to look up anything I'd rather others not know about, I simply pop open an incognito window and... am I good to go? Is there anything besides my IP address that can be read when I'm doing that?

"which can often uniquely identify you."<p>"and potentially show up in unwanted places, like insurance, credit &#38; background checks."<p>yeah, i'm pretty sure that's not a thing that can happen.<p>also, if you like the internet being free then you shouldn't mind seeing ads for your demographic that get a better roi and make more money for publishers of the content you don't pay for.

I believe I was one of the people who requested this. Namely, a better explanation of why DDG not tracking your search history is a big deal.<p>Implementation details aside, this page must exists and I applaud Gabriel for making it. Why? I must have been living under a rock, but I for one have never heard of https search for Google -- and I'm not exactly a computer newb.<p>Privacy should be the default, so "use secure Google" is a ridiculous response to legitimate privacy concerns.<p>Feedback:<p>1. I really appreciated how fast information is delivered. "One thing leads to another." And its very clear up to...<p>2. You lost me after the "Your profile can also be sold," with lolcat material. It really threw me off and I almost forgot what I was reading about. On my first run through the page, did not absorb ANY information past that point.<p>3. I only noticed the multiple (happens) links on the second run. Noticed one somewhere along the way on the first run, but not the reast. This is the important part. It tells me that this isn't a list of "imagine these unlikely events and fear", its a list of "did you know this actually happened."<p>4. The images establish pace for the reader, but, I can't stress it enough, they must communicate additional information. Up until the parental control cat we get a visual of what happens. I can also relate to the images because I've seen ads for "wacom tablets" follow me for months after I bought the freaking thing and I've seen the Google Analytics control panel. The image of the woman signifies that her profile is slowly building up. What information does the parental control cat or austin powers communicate?<p>5. The design is a little too bland, but as noted above, that's not the biggest problem. I wanted to link my friends to the page, but then got to the images and felt that the message would be lost on them as it was lost on me.<p>Hope this helps and thank you for making the page.

Why not simply use <a href="https://encrypted.google.com" rel="nofollow">https://encrypted.google.com</a> with <a href="http://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout" rel="nofollow">http://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout</a>?

I like DuckDuckGo. I use it and it's a good search service. But I'm left with a question after this site:<p>Isn't Google's tracking a _good_ thing in many ways? I want sites to know what I've come searching for so they can present me peripheral content I want and I want Google to know my interests so that they show me ads related to those interests.<p>I agree Google could do more to alert users about what privacies they are giving up, and I'm glad there's good alternatives if you don't want that info tracked. I think not enough is made of the good side of Google's personalization, however.

Good explanations of privacy issue using Google for the neophyte. Thanks for this, I'll use this link when I tell someone about the online privacy stuff.

If you don't want to be tracked but still want to use google there are three great browser extensions which make that possible: <a href="http://techblog.willshouse.com/2011/01/03/three-extensions-to-protect-privacy-against-google/" rel="nofollow">http://techblog.willshouse.com/2011/01/03/three-extensions-t...</a>

I'm still dreaming of a search engine that parses regular expressions. When that happens I'm there. Yesterday.

But isn't the referral header and search terms good for the webmaster? It allows them to customize the website for their customers and allows them to find out what their customers are looking for.

This page converted me. I'm giving DDG a test as my primary search.

<a href="http://www.google.com/search?q=rails" rel="nofollow">http://www.google.com/search?q=rails</a> vs <a href="https://duckduckgo.com/?q=rails" rel="nofollow">https://duckduckgo.com/?q=rails</a><p><a href="https://duckduckgo.com/?q=python" rel="nofollow">https://duckduckgo.com/?q=python</a> vs <a href="http://www.google.com/search?q=rails" rel="nofollow">http://www.google.com/search?q=rails</a><p>I rest my case. Don't get me wrong. I like DDG but this campaign seems like spreading FUD. BTW, I use https by default.

I don't think this is an important indictment of Google at all, but I <i>do</i> think it is an important warning (mainly because of its simplicity and digestibility) to those people who don't understand how the interweb tubes work.<p>For instance, I forwarded the entire page as-is (Cmd-I in Safari if you have Apple's Mail configured) to my little sister.

How does duck duck go make money?<p>I saw something about adding affiliate links to Amazon results. What else?

There is a thin line between "fighting for what's right (privacy)" and "building paranoia to earn profit" and I think DDG just crossed it :(<p>I like the search engine and I wish them all the best (seriously), but this method of advertising is bad.

I love the reference to the austin powers' "in a nutshell" scene, heheh.

Does it really matter that DDG works around the referer header when embarrassingillness.com/herpes has your IP address, and anything else your browser sends to them.

There ought to be a browser plugin for the paranoid... surely someone must have tried to make one?

bookmarking, delicious-ing, resending to ( / spamming) all my friends and family ....<p>ddg rules and this finally puts my pov into nice, simple, pretty pictures.<p>W00t!

Too much FUD.

I seriously do not get this privacy sham. All of a sudden everybody and there uncle is very concious about some algorithms (that select the ad for you) knowing what they searched for. I mean even if I search for something inappropriate and then google ads algorithm knows what I searched for, big deal yaar whats the harm?<p>I presume referrer headers existed even before google and this privacy outrage. The thing I do not understand is, why this sudden conciousness about some database of what you searched online?

I think the more appropriate summary is that DuckDuckGo proactively guards your privacy. Google is completely aware of privacy issues, but allows privacy to slip through the sieve by being indecisive about what to do about it.

Awesome promotional/marketting angle. Smart way to compete against Google.