DuckDuckGo:
In our quest to provide the best experience for local searches, earlier this year we announced that we’re now using Apple’s MapKit JS framework to power our mapping features. Since then, we’ve been continually working hard on further enhancements and we’re excited today to show you some new improvements.
Read the linked press release to learn all the details but, in a nutshell, this is a big leap forward for DuckDuckGo and mapping.
And, at least in my local area, this pushed it a little bit past Google Maps. There’s a pizza place a few blocks away that opened about a month ago. It’s on DuckDuckGo (because Apple Maps) and it is not yet on Google Maps.
Small sample size, I know, but it makes privacy respecting DuckDuckGo more of an equal browsing choice for me.
Shouldn’t there be a hyphen between “privacy” and “respecting”?
Ulmon maps are so much better in Europe.
And, you can download PDF versions to your idevice
I was thinking about this just this morning in the shower. I have now officially switched search engines on all my devices. I was so sick of Google pushing me to use Google Maps in iOS 13 and no option to force Apple Maps.
Not a problem any longer.
I use DuckDuckGo myself, but one small question: how do we know they actually protect privacy, other than that they say they do? What if it is a CIA/FBI/KGB front to collect data under the guise of privacy?
Main way sites track people is cookies. There’s nothing really wrong with using cookies to track people on a single site unless you’re badly abusing it, but have a look at how little DuckDuckGo stores.
I’m pretty sure Google, for example, uses far more sophisticated methods than cookies to track people, the majority of which don’t require anything stored on the local machine (not that they don’t use cookies too; they do).
There are ways to track using browser metrics, but most of these are getting closed out. (IP address is hard to get rid of, though.)