More people using search engines with 'zero tracking' feature

LONDON: The secret snooping program of the US government may have stirred doubts and fear amongst the internet users, but a search site with 'zero tracking' feature has basked in the popularity. 

According to the Guardian, search site 'DuckDuckGo' saw huge rise in traffic post the revelations by whistleblower Edward Snowden. 

Within days of revelations, founder of the site, Gabriel Weinberg noticed that his site, which pledges not to track or store data about its users, was getting 50 percent more traffic than ever before and is going up with more revelations about NSA and GCHQ's internet tapping. 


The NSA has been alleged to have 'direct access' to the servers of the web's biggest search engines Google, Microsoft and Yahoo. 

Weinberg said that the search data 'is arguably the most personal data people are entering into anything'. 

From serving 1.7m searches a day at the start of June, DuckDuckGo hit 3m within a fortnight. 

According to the report, Weinberg said that DuckDuckGo with zero tracking doesn't use cookies or store data about its users' IP addresses, doesn't offer user logins, and uses an encrypted connection by default and if the NSA demanded data from DuckDuckGo, there would be none to hand over. 

Weinberg said that the decision to not store user data was not a political decision, but a personal one adding that storing search data reveals so much about the user. 

On Google storing the data, Weinberg said that it is a myth that Google needs to store all the data about users, as almost all the money they make on search is based on what one types in the search box. 

He further said that Google needs to track users for their other services, G mail and YouTube because those are hard to monetize  and that's why a user gets ads following around the internet all the time, the report added.

source:toi