NWA-PCUG Newsletter Article, September 2012
What do you mean there are other search engines?
By Linda Gonse, Editor/Webmaster,
ORCOPUG (Orange County PCUG), California April 2012 issue,
Nibbles ‘n Bits
http://www.orcopug.org
editor (at) orcopug.org (click to email author)

It will come as a surprise to some people that there are more choices than Google or Bing for Internet search engines. Two newer and smaller search engines that do not have a large market share of users or the reach of the major search engines actually can be unique and helpful secondary Internet search tools.

One of these is a general purpose search engine with the catchy name of DuckDuckGo which claims it will give users “way more instant answers, way less spam and real privacy.”

Billing itself as “the search engine you’ve never heard of,” it surpassed 1,000,000 searches in one day for the first time on February 14, 2012. Similar to Google’s one click “I’m feeling lucky” search, DuckDuckGo has its own one click “I’m feeling ducky” button for searches.

But, perhaps the most innovative search feature are DuckDuckGo’s !bangs commands that allow you to designate a major site/category on which to base the search. On the search page, click the down arrow and select one of the popular target sites. It will appear in the search box with an exclamation point and its letter code. Next to it, type in your search term and press enter. Bang! It takes you directly to that website where the results of your search term are displayed. For instance, choose Amazon – !a – from the dropdown list of Bangs. Then, type “bestseller books” and press enter. A list of bestselling books at the Amazon site appears instantly.

Perhaps, just as importantly to some, DuckDuckGo’s company philosophy is that “DuckDuckGo does not collect or share personal information. That is our privacy policy in a nutshell.”

An enthusiastic blogger at programmableweb.com said, “The search engine provides clean, uncluttered results and is very easy to use.” Check out duckduckgo.com.

Gibiru is a free, uncensored anonymous internet search engine and year-old Silicon Valley startup that reached 10,000 daily searches in January 2012.

Besides the limits placed by the National Security Agency, services such as America OnLine, Microsoft, Yahoo and others are slowly turning the Internet into an information superhighway dominated by barricades, toll booths, and tracking codes. They use geolocation filtering which restricts or modifys web content based on the geographical region of the user.

Such filtering can now be implemented for countries, states, cities, and even individual IP addresses. Also, due to tracking and filtering, search results are now tailored to the individual IP addresses which are conducting a search; so their “personalized” search results will be skewed and vary from one user’s results to another user’s results.

Gibiru provides the basic Google search results most people are familiar with, but when searching the web through Gibiru, the system does not utilize the searcher’s IP address or cookie data when it returns the search results; providing a non-personalized, all-inclusive, private search experience. Gibiru gathers no personal information on its users.

However, due to some Google code needed for results, “Gibiru may use aggregated statistics to manage bandwidth and site performance. Gibiru makes nor implies any guarantee that a site or sites visited after leaving the Gibiru search results will not be tracking the user independently or storing data the user.”

You can try Gibiru out at gibiru.com.

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