Linux users do have reasons to be grateful to the almighty search engine Google. After all, Google gave the world the (mostly) open source Android operating system [1]. Still, many phones and devices come preinstalled with Google's app – a firm whose bottom line is largely based on serving you more and more targeted ads. This isn't good for your privacy, and as recently as late December 2022, the search engine was fined around $57 million in France due to its handling of customers' data [2].

As Linux users, we're used to finding workarounds, so in theory it's not much trouble to "de-Google" your life. In practice, this is very difficult given Google's market dominance. DuckDuckGo was originally created by Gabriel Weinberg to address these kind of privacy worries. Out of the box, the search engine does not serve you up personalized ads, nor does it rely on content farms to display results. The results come from the search engine's own crawler as well as partnerships it has with other search sites such as Bing and Yahoo! Search.

Unlike Google, DuckDuckGo doesn't use any hidden trackers. There are adverts, but these are personalized for you. It doesn't place you in a "filter bubble" by listing search results based on your location, nor does it try to trap you in an elaborate "ecosystem" of apps for mapping, email, travel, and so on [3].

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