Switch to DuckDuckGo in iOS and OS X

Privacy is a big concern for many people these days, and one way to help protect your privacy is to change Safari’s default search engine from Google to DuckDuckGo. Unlike Google, DuckDuckGo does not track you or filter bubble your search results. And it’s quite easy to make DuckDuckGo your default search engine in Safari in OS X and iOS.

How to make DuckDuckGo your default search engine in OS X

Just follow these simple steps to make DuckDuckGo your default search engine in Safari on the Mac:

1. Go to Preferences in Safari.

2. Click on the Search tab.

3. Click on DuckDuckGo in the search engine drop down menu.

And that’s it. You can close Safari’s preferences window, and now DuckDuckGo will be your default search engine in Safari in OS X.

How to make DuckDuckGo your default search engine in iOS

Follow these steps to make DuckDuckGo your default search engine in Safari on the iPad, iPhone or iPod:

1. Open the Settings app on your iOS device.

2. Tap on Safari.

3. Tap on Search Engine.

4. Tap on DuckDuckGo

You can now close the Settings app in iOS, and DuckDuckGo will be your default search engine in Safari on your iOS device.

More information about DuckDuckGo

If you aren’t familiar with DuckDuckGo, here’s some basic information about it from the site’s Privacy page:

DuckDuckGo does not collect or share personal information. That is our privacy policy in a nutshell. The rest of this page tries to explain why you should care.

DuckDuckGo prevents search leakage by default. Instead, when you click on a link on our site, we route (redirect) that request in such a way so that it does not send your search terms to other sites. The other sites will still know that you visited them, but they will not know what search you entered beforehand.

…DuckDuckGo takes the approach to not collect any personal information. The decisions of whether and how to comply with law enforcement requests, whether and how to anonymize data, and how to best protect your information from hackers are out of our hands. Your search history is safe with us because it cannot be tied to you in any way.

At DuckDuckGo, no cookies are used by default. If you have changed any settings, then cookies are used to store those changes. However, in that case, they are not stored in a personally identifiable way. For example, the large size setting is stored as ‘s=l’; no unique identifier is in there. Furthermore, if you prefer not to use cookies to store settings, you can use URL parameters instead.

More at DuckDuckGo

I’ve used DuckDuckGo as my default search engine for quite a long time, and it works very well for me. If you haven’t used DuckDuckGo, I strongly suggest you give it a try. You’ll feel a lot better knowing that your searches are private and that you aren’t being tracked by Google or its advertisers when you need to find information on the Web.

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