Firefox celebrates 10 years since it was first released; in recent days, the updates and point releases occur more often.
The latest Firefox release, 33.1.1 introduces the search engine DuckDuckGo as one of its search options; the setting can be modified to make DuckDuckGo the default search engine, if needed.
Before you chime in about privacy concerns that would steer you away from Google, however, consider this: DuckDuckGo is not a domainer-friendly search engine.
In 2009, the creators of what eventually became the DuckDuckGo search engine, published an add-on toolbar for the Mozilla Firefox browser.
At that time, Firefox was still in its infancy, with release 3.0 and a market share that trailed that of Microsoft IE. The DuckDuckGo Toolbar, as it existed in 2009, intended to provide instant, remote database-driven blocking of web sites that are simply parked.
In all, at that time, 42 million parked web sites were stored and tagged as “useless” or “garbage“, simply because the creators of the toolbar did not like the concept of domain parking and monetization.
While PPC parking has sustained a strong blow in recent years thanks to changes in Google ranking algorithms, it’s far from dead despite claims by domain industry “experts.” 😉
For truly independent, peer-to-peer searching, one can also test out YaCy.
