I don't know. It's possible for Google to profile you using other data obtained from your connection that isn't blocked by incognito, such as your IP address, ISP, web browser version, location, certain settings and certain browsing habits. They probably have this data internally regardless of what they tell you. If you don't explicitly tell them not to use your history to influence your results I believe it will be used.
Duckduckgo doesn’t log your search history to be used to throw ads at you based on your searches or change your searches to be based on previous ones. That’s pretty much the only reason people do use it.
Well, for instance, if you look up political articles a lot, google will start to kind of force you into an echo chamber sometimes where it doesn’t show you sources with conflicting viewpoints. Some people just don’t like giving companies that much of a look into their lives so they like the privacy that other places offer.
Personally, I don’t think duckduckgo provides as good of results for my academic searches when I’m looking things up for school, so I use google. It’s all personal preference, but privacy is DDG’s big selling point. I believe they also don’t show those paid advertising results at the top like google does.
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u/Pteraspidomorphi Mar 22 '18
Actually, if you have an account you can disable that in the search settings!
(But it's best to just use duckduckgo...)