The minor, but excellent, Google competitor Duck Duck Go has announced it is now receiving a million search queries per day – a number that would have excited Page and Brin when they were starting out.
See the numbers here:
https://duckduckgo.com/traffic.html
I like Duck Duck Go, they rank my Men in Black 3 site at #1
As search engines increasingly gather and store data about their users, there is an opportunity for a new search engine that just provides good results, and nothing else. Which is easy to achieve when you are starting out – but if such a search engine ever does well, there will be pressure to start doing the very things they were against, for the $$$. Of course Wikipedia have stuck to their no-ad promise, so it’s possible for a search engine as well.
Stealth doesn’t record any info, and routes your search query through other servers so that the link you click on doesn’t pass on referrer data (browser, IP, search query, cookies etc).
In their F.A.Q there’s this:
We do a good bit of our own crawling and also utilize many different API’s (Google’s Ajax API, Bing’s search API, etc) as well.
From looking at their search results, I think it is fair to say the results are 100% lifted from Google. So for now, if you like Google results (just web, not universal) and care about privacy, use UseStealth.com
Maybe ranking services could use it, and maybe it could become the de facto standard for determining a site’s ranking in Google.
One day we will be able to self-diagnose. The next step towards that goal has been provided by Google. Now, if you search for a symptom or multiple symptoms, Google might return “related searches”. That’s all Google will dare call them, because it is just the algorithm making the connection, not a person and certainly not a doctor.
While this start is exciting, I hope people don’t mistake the first 5 results for being the only possible illnesses related to the symptoms…