Is DuckDuckGo a Good Search Engine?

Yes! We clearly think DuckDuckGo is a great search engine – and so much more.

If you’re unfamiliar with DuckDuckGo, we're the leading provider of simple privacy protection tools to help you seamlessly take back control of your personal information online. We’ve been providing a private, encrypted alternative to Google Search at duckduckgo.com for over a decade. We offer the DuckDuckGo Private Browser, which comes equipped with our full lineup of privacy features, for iOS, Android, Mac and Windows; we’ve also got browser extensions for Firefox, Chrome, Edge and Safari (DuckDuckGo Privacy Essentials) to help protect your privacy in other browsers.

Searching the web with DuckDuckGo Search is completely anonymous; we simply never save or share any personal information that could tie you back to your searches, as explained in our strict privacy policy. For example, we don’t store IP addresses or any other unique identifiers in search logs. As a result, we don’t even have the ability to create search histories or data profiles for any individual. It’s privacy by design.

We think that’s awesome, and we hope you do too…but are the search results any good? Again, yes – and we’re not alone in saying so!

DuckDuckGo Search gives you truly private search results without tradeoffs in result quality. We have everything you’ve come to expect in your online search experience, plus a few bonus features that make searching the Internet not only more private, but faster and a bit more fun, too.

DuckDuckGo Search features include...

Maps

Weather

Local business information (e.g. addresses, phone numbers, and business hours)

News

Images

Videos‌                                                                      

Shopping

Definitions

Sports scores

Wikipedia reference

Currency conversions

Song lyrics

Calculator

Timer

StackOverflow reference for computer programming

DuckDuckGo Search Bonus Features

We also have a couple of bonus features that you might have never seen before. There may be times when you want to search on other websites, and we make that very easy with a feature we call "bangs" – shortcuts that take you directly to one of over 12,000 websites. (For example, searching for "!w duck" will take you directly to Wikipedia's article about our feathered friends.) Remember, though: because your search is actually taking place on that other site, you are subject to that site’s policies, including its data collection practices.

With DuckDuckGo, you can even customize the way the search results look and feel including a popular dark theme, which even triggers dark mode maps.

It's also important to be able to customize the search experience, so we have many settings such as language and region localization.

Back to Privacy

We've tried to make it as easy as possible to switch to DuckDuckGo Search from other search engines. But why should you bother? Privacy.

You share your most intimate secrets with your search engine without even thinking: medical, financial, and personal issues, along with all the day-to-day things that make you, well, you. All of that personal information should be private, but – on Google – it’s not. On Google, your searches are tracked, stored, and packaged up into a data profile for advertisers to follow you around the Internet through those intrusive and annoying banner ads, using Google’s massive ad networks embedded across millions of sites and apps.

If you do switch to DuckDuckGo Search, keep in mind that some of the results you're used to getting when you search will be different. And different isn’t a bad thing!

One way our search results are different is that, unlike other search engines, we don’t alter results based on someone’s previous search history. In fact, since we don’t track our users, we don’t have access to search histories at all! Those other search engines show you results based on a data profile about you and your online activity, including your search history; based on this profiling, your results can be slanted towards what they think you're most likely to click on. This effect is commonly known as the search filter bubble. Using DuckDuckGo can help you escape it.

This doesn't mean our search results are generally “unfiltered,” because, for every search you make online, a search engine’s job is to filter millions of possible results down to a ranked list of just a handful. In other words, a search engine has to use algorithms programmed by people to determine what shows up first in the list of results, what shows up second, and so on. Otherwise, you’d just get a completely random set of results for every search, which wouldn’t be very useful.

So, give DuckDuckGo Search a try! The results are not just private, they're accurate and fast. To go one step further, we’d recommend making the DuckDuckGo Private Browser (iOS/Android/Mac/Windows) your everyday browser, too – it’s like Google Search and Chrome in one app, but without all the tracking.

Note: This blog post has been edited since initial publication to stay up to date with our evolving product offerings.