I've been trying to find ways to reduce the amount of information about me that's tracked every time I do anything online. I don't like that every piece of activity is tracked, analyzed, and sold. I've said over and over, that if any government or agency had proposed tracking this much data on every citizen, there would be an uproar. But we just shrug it off when it's done by the big online properties.
So I have just sworn off using the Google search engine. Well, as much as physically possible - it's still built into to so much that it's absolutely impossible to completely withdraw from Google.
But, I'm going to try switching to DuckDuckGo. Some early tests show that the search engine is decent. The results may be ranked differently than Google's, but that may be a good thing. What interests me isn't the search engine, as much as *they give a crap [about privacy](http://donttrack.us/)*.
They have a [pretty detailed description of what they do to prevent personal info leakage](https://duckduckgo.com/privacy.html), which makes me want to use DuckDuckGo far more than any of the others. And, the search engine has some pretty cool features, including [!Bang](https://duckduckgo.com/bang.html).
My biggest concern with DuckDuckGo is how they pay their bills. I'm not seeing any ads on the site, nor in the search results. That's great, but then how are they paying for bandwidth and infrastructure, and who's paying the people running it? So far, [it looks to be self-funding](http://duck.co/#Topic/28469000000154001), but how will that be sustainable?
Regardless, it's an interesting new search engine that puts privacy to the forefront, rather than quietly tracking everything you do while simultaneously shouting "DO NO EVIL."
I found out about DuckDuckGo [through a thread on Reddit](http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/evirl/google_tracks_you_we_dont_an_illustrated_guide/), where [the developer was responding to additional privacy concerns by modifying the search engine on the fly](http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/evirl/google_tracks_you_we_dont_an_illustrated_guide/c1bbob1). That's pretty cool stuff.