Plan Your Route Privately: DuckDuckGo Now Has Driving & Walking Directions
We've been providing users with mapping features within DuckDuckGo Search for many years, along the way improving them with greater accuracy, dark mode, local re-querying and more. Now we're excited to announce a big step forward with the introduction of directions – private, as always, and like our embedded maps, powered by Apple's MapKit JS framework and already familiar to millions of users.
You'll now see a new addition to location and map search results that will help you plan trips by showing you a route overview, distance and travel time. Look out for it both at the top of search results that display a map, as well as within our expanded map module. Let's see an example of the latter…
- A location query such as Tower of London can open our expanded maps, as usual.
- Clicking the Directions button in the map sidebar will now display boxes to enter a starting point and a destination. For convenience, the starting point by default will be set to your current location, which works anonymously (as explained below). The best routes and their estimated durations will be shown on the map, and updating the starting point will redraw the available routes.
As with all our search features, your privacy is still protected when using these directions thanks to our strict privacy policy of not collecting or sharing any personal information. In the case of location-related searches, your browser sends location information which we isolate from any personal information the browser sends, and which we discard after use, enabling us to provide anonymous localized results and features. Our help page has more detail on how we keep location searches private.
Route planning was a missing piece in DuckDuckGo Search. Integrating it means our maps now have the functionality you expect with the privacy you deserve, with no trade-offs.
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