Do you ever feel like your Internet searches are following you around, that Google itself is stalking you? You’re not alone. Columnist Rob Witzel has joined the growing multitude of people who are not only questioning that reverberating echo of your searches but actually cutting it off, thanks to the soaring popularity of Paoli-born anti-tracking search engine DuckDuckGo.

“If this frustrates you or makes you feel taken advantage of, then it’s time to get real. Start thinking of your keyboard as a bullhorn and your search history as a billboard. Internet privacy is about as real as the Boogie Man,” Witzel wrote on Ocala.com.

He points to DuckDuckGo specifically as a refuge away from the “prying eyes of Big G snooping over your shoulder,” a rapidly developing search engine designed to protect your identity and private information in a way that doesn’t track what you do and doesn’t filter out what it thinks you don’t want to see.

“It’s not just the piracy of our personal information but the uncomfortable reality that these companies have a way of controlling what information you actually see,” Witzel added.

Without DuckDuckGo, he explains there would be no pressure on Google, Bing and Yahoo! to dial back the extent to which they dig into users’ privacy.

“With the pressure for profits always looming, do you think these services will show us what most interests us or most interests them?”

With DuckDuckGo, the question is moot and the answer is simple: Your search results are not collected or tracked, so you see everything you’re searching for with fewer clicks, fewer ads and less clutter.

And soon it will be even easier to search securely, as Apple has taken notice of the anti-Google search startup and committed to including it as a default search engine you can select in its next Mac and iOS releases.

Read more of Witzel’s review and the community-driven search engine DuckDuckGo on Ocala.com here.