I've been trying to remove as much of my dependence on Google from my life as possible. One area that's really hard is search. I've been using DuckDuckGo as my search engine as much as possible the last few months, and I've mostly been very happy. Don't get me wrong, I'm a long way away from dropping Google entirely, but I'm trying.

Michael Rosenwald has written a great story about DuckDuckGo for The Washington Post. This is the story of a small guy taking on a true industry giant and trying to carve out a niche. Even if Google's privacy issues don't creep you out at all, it's a story worth reading.

“My thesis for the company was, what can we do that other search engines, because they’re big, can’t do easily?” Weinberg said. “Because what’s good for Google business is bad for Google users.”

So: DuckDuckGo does not track users. It doesn’t generate search results based on a user’s previous interests, potentially filtering out relevant information. It is not cluttered with ads. In many ways, DuckDuckGo is an homage the original Google — a pure search engine — and its use is soaring, with searches up from 10 million a month in October 2011 to 45 million this past October.