DuckDuckGo[ogle]

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In addition to some suggestions I recently offered about making your computer and your privacy (possibly) less vulnerable to invasion when using the web, I stumbled across another goodie that seems positioned for breakout popularity soon. It's a search engine called DuckDuckGo.

First, it reminds me of Google 10-plus years ago: a simple site that searches for stuff you type in real fast and returns results rank-ordered in terms of raw relevance in relation to your keywords. Many of us with broadband access at work developed a reflexive Google habit sometime during the second term of Hillary Clinton's peckerwood husband. And probably just as many of us have retained the habit, uncritically. This has enabled Google to build a colossal technology concern, funded by advertising targeted to your web browser and its search history (and by cross-referencing lots of other stuff in the background). Good for them; I'm happy to see a (somewhat) progressive competitor in the tech business to challenge Apple, Microsoft, RIM, Sony, and whomever.

During the past decade, though, Google dove into an aggressively extractive business model that some people call corporatism. As it has happened everywhere else over the past 30 years, people on the internet have devolved from human beings into customers and then resources; from citizens into capital and then commodities. This isn't Google's fault, of course, but Google is evidently really good at delivering our eyeballs to merchants and marketing snoops who then use them to colonize our attention. (I say "apparently" because Firefox and its privacy plug-ins shield me from most of it, so I don't observe the full extent of the privacy invasion from where I sit.)

Anyway, I've found the Google search engine to be a lot less helpful to me in the past several years. Maybe you have, too. And you, like I, have probably read about why this is the case. For example, Google delivers search results keyed to our ZIP code, our search history, stuff reported back to the company by our browser cookies, and so on. At the DuckDuckGo site, they explain it. The term of art is bubbling, as in keeping you in a bubble of isolation, searchwise, based on what Google and its "partners" determine to be the best way to extract consumer-type attention from you. Check it out. It's the clearest and most concise explanation of bubbling I've seen. Likewise, read their explanation of how tracking works. Top-notch education in a dozen pictures and captions.

My initial results with DuckDuckGo seem to be a world away from the chaff that Google delivers these days. I've set a button on my Firefox bookmark bar and will install the DDG search plug-in as soon as Mozilla gets its act together and fixes the Firefox installation bug. (Dumbness that I won't get sidetracked on here.)

I haven't read anything about the company yet, and I hope their strat plan isn't to become "the next Google." If they were to set up as an open-source nonprofit like the Wikimedia Foundation, I'd donate some green stuff to them.

I don't have any animosity toward Google The Corporation, but extractive capitalism is just not compatible with respect for the individual and his or her privacy. So their having a real search competitor is just fine with me.