In its early days, users envisioned the internet as a sort of “digital commons”: a place where ordinary people could come and go as they pleased, and have access to all the resources imaginable. Sadly, that idyllic vision didn’t account for the costs of site maintenance or bandwidth. Ultimately, we’ve arrived at a scenario where most “free” services are funded by monetizing your private data.
It didn’t necessarily have to go this way, but here we are. It means everyday life online is a constant balancing act between usability and privacy, and we’ve often written about that balance here on this blog. One of the biggest aggregators of data is Google, which means finding alternatives to Google’s services is a priority for some privacy-conscious people. One of those alternatives is DuckDuckGo, which claims to offer privacy-centric search. Is DuckDuckGo safe? How does it work? Let’s dig in and find out.
What is DuckDuckGo?
DuckDuckGo describes itself as “an independent internet privacy company,” which offers privacy-centric search, a privacy-based browser, and a number of related products. The company began in 2008 in founder Gabriel Weinberg’s basement. As Weinberg told Forbes in 2016, he was looking for a way to improve his search results by weeding out the spam. It was rolled out to the public later that year, and by 2010, Weinberg and his collaborators made a conscious decision not to track its users. It was a very deliberate choice, made to draw a clear contrast with Google’s increasingly invasive policies.
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A decade later, in 2018, DuckDuckGo expanded its offerings with a mobile app and browser extensions. Standalone browsers for Mac and Windows computers followed in 2023. Although its search volume is dwarfed by Google’s, DuckDuckGo has held roughly 2 to 2.5 percent market share in the US during the 2020s, which adds up to billions of searches per month. Its mobile search market share was 1.8 percent as of April 2023. That’s slightly lower, but puts it second only to Google in mobile search.
DuckDuckGo proudly boasts that it doesn’t track or retain user data, including your search history. That does mean you’ll give up a degree of personalization, but you’ll recapture a large measure of privacy in exchange. For most of its millions of users, that’s a worthwhile tradeoff.
Why DuckDuckGo is Bad, According to Some Users
There’s a cynical aphorism that “no good deed goes unpunished,” and despite its ideals and pro-privacy stance, DuckDuckGo has come in for its share of criticism. Some of those criticisms focus on its management of user privacy, and others zero in on its claim to provide non-curated search results.
Accusations of Politically Motivated Censorship
DuckDuckGo is careful not to describe its search results as “unfiltered,” because filtering results is exactly what you want a search engine to do. But its search results aren’t tweaked and personalized, the way Google’s are, to show you only what it thinks you’ll want to see. For that reason, users who earnestly believe that Google (and Big Tech in general) censors or suppresses their political views embraced DuckDuckGo as an alternative, even dubbing it the “free speech” search engine.
That honeymoon met reality after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, when DuckDuckGo severed its working relationship with Russian search engine Yandex and began down-ranking sites that peddled Russian disinformation. Founder Gabe Weinberg took to social media himself to defend the company’s actions, arguing that returning accurate, high-quality results is a search engine’s job, and that misinformation is — by definition — a low-quality result.
Questions about DuckDuckGo’s Commitment to Privacy
A more fundamental criticism hit DuckDuckGo in 2022, when researchers discovered that despite its anti-tracking stance, it was giving a pass to some Microsoft trackers. The company pointed out that:
- This affected only its browser, not its search results.
- It was contractually obligated to allow those trackers, by the terms of its deal with Microsoft (Microsoft’s Bing search engine provides most of DuckDuckGo’s search results).
- The criticism came largely from a direct competitor, CEO Brandon Eich of rival browser Brave, but the site used for testing DuckDuckGo vs its rival was actually owned and operated by a Brave employee.
Nevertheless, the reporting was accurate as far as it went. Microsoft still would not have been able to track or profile an individual user as a result, but would at least still know when an ad was clicked.
The whole controversy went to the heart of DuckDuckGo’s stated mission, and its main selling point as an alternative to Google: user privacy. At this point, it’s appropriate to take a closer look at how exactly DuckDuckGo manages its users’ privacy and data.
How Low is the Bar for Privacy?
To properly understand what DuckDuckGo doesn’t do, you first have to understand what its competitors do. Google is the king of the hill, and it records everything about your search: the search terms you used, the results you clicked on, your location at the time, details about your devices, and much, much, much more.
The thing is, you probably use a lot more than just Google’s search. Most of us use some combination of its other products and services, from YouTube and Gmail to Maps and Chrome, or the Android and Chrome OS operating systems. Google collects high levels of data from those sources and integrates them all under your Google Account. The company is pretty up-front about what information it collects, though it’s always positioned as (and in fairness, generally is) a way to provide you with better services and more personalization.
Google also emphasizes that it won’t sell your private information, though privacy-centric critics like the Electronic Frontier Foundation are quick to point out that it can monetize your private data in many ways without explicitly “selling” it. Moreover, while the company anonymizes the data it shares with its various commercial partners, de-anonymizing data — uncovering the actual individuals associated with it — is startlingly easy to do.
The other leading players in search (Microsoft and Yahoo) make similar links between your searches and their other services, though they aren’t able to gather quite the depth and breadth of data that Google does.
How Does DuckDuckGo Address Privacy?
Now that you understand the context, let’s look at how DuckDuckGo handles privacy. There are a few key details, and they’re all laid out in the company’s Privacy Policy. If you’ve looked at other tech companies’ Privacy Policies, this one will look strange: it’s a couple of dozen paragraphs of plain, ordinary language, much like the articles here on our blog, complete with informative titles for each section. It’s a sharp contrast to the usual dense pages of inscrutable legalese you’ll see elsewhere.
The short version is that DuckDuckGo uses only the data necessary to actually process your request, and only until you close the tab (or the app, on your phone). Your search history isn’t stored, your location and device data aren’t stored, and it doesn’t monitor anything you do on any other site or app. Even if you reach out to DuckDuckGo directly for something like a technical support issue, which necessarily means giving them specific personal data, they won’t keep it once your issue is resolved.
Every DuckDuckGo query is encrypted, so even if your devices or your network are compromised, you’ll still have a measure of protection against eavesdropping by hackers or identity thieves. Finally, any data that DuckDuckGo needs to share with its partner companies and service providers is stripped of identifying information. And yes, that now includes Microsoft.
Using DuckDuckGo vs. Other Search Engines
Although DuckDuckGo’s focus on privacy is its key selling point, like any other search engine, it has to actually, you know… search. So how does DuckDuckGo stack up against Google and Bing? Let’s take a look at how they compare.
Quick Comparison: Google vs. Bing vs. DuckDuckGo
Go ahead and type a search — any search — into Google, then Bing, and then DuckDuckGo. If you flip back and forth between the three, you’ll see a lot of similarities. Google usually shows “Featured Snippets” at the top of search results to provide quick answers to your queries, and DuckDuckGo’s “Quick Answers” fill the same role. There’s a “knowledge panel” to the right of the screen with all three search engines, providing a more in-depth (but still at-a-glance) answer. All three provide maps, news results, reviews, images, videos, and suggestions for related searches.
The differences largely show up in the details. Google gets its reviews and maps, of course, from Google Reviews and Google Maps. DuckDuckGo uses Yelp reviews and Apple Maps, while Bing uses TripAdvisor and OpenStreetMap. Google (surprise!) is much more likely to surface Google-owned YouTube videos for you to look at. Google also has features like “People Also Ask” and the ability to set a custom date range for your search results, which the other two don’t.
Search Quality in Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo
What about the quality of results? Well, there are good reasons for Google’s dominance in search. Precisely because it gathers up so much data from all of your activities, it’s usually able to serve a set of search results that are finely tuned to what you want. Remember, big datasets can be mined for deeper, broader patterns (like your comics-nerd friend, who can explain every hidden “Easter egg” reference in every Marvel movie), and nobody has deeper datasets than Google.
If you’re trying to dig up a half-remembered song, or “that movie with that one guy in it,” Google is your best bet. Bing is no slouch in the personalization department either, because Microsoft – through the Windows OS, Edge browser, and its Office products — also hoovers up a lot of private data.
This is both an advantage and a disadvantage for DuckDuckGo. Because its searches don’t draw on your search history and entire online life, its results may be less pertinent. On the other hand, it may surface search results that the other two won’t, for exactly the same reason. This can be a factor if you use the same device for work and personal purposes, or if you share a computer with others: inferences drawn from other uses, or other users, can impact what you’re searching for right now.
Privacy in Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo
That exact conflict between convenience and privacy is DuckDuckGo’s selling point. If you want the absolutely best possible search results, they come from personalization, and that — in turn — relies on data gathering. Maximizing privacy relies on minimizing data gathering. It’s a conundrum, and you have to decide where you sit on that spectrum.
Let’s look at a specific example. Google and Bing provide you with localized search options (restaurants, weather, etc) by detecting your location, unless you’ve turned off location tracking. If you have, they’ll prompt you to turn it back on. DuckDuckGo’s privacy-centric workaround for local search is to guess where you are based on the Internet Protocol (IP) address reported to your device, and then send that approximate location to its search partners. Optionally, you can choose to let DuckDuckGo detect your location on a one-off basis or manually set a location.
What About Manipulation of Search Results?
Again, this question revolves around your definition of “manipulation.” Some would argue that DuckDuckGo’s down-ranking of misinformation sites counts as manipulation, while DuckDuckGo itself argues that it is simply countering the misinformation sites’ own manipulation of search engine algorithms.
You may remember that Gabe Weinberg’s original motivation was getting rid of “spammy” search results. This is an ongoing headache for Google in particular because of its market dominance. The workings of Google’s search algorithm are the key to its success, and a closely-guarded trade secret; but there’s an entire industry called Search Engine Optimization (SEO) dedicated to figuring out how it works, and how to rank well in Google searches. A 2024 German study found that product review searches (“The Best [X] in 2023”) were especially vulnerable to this kind of spamming.
The study showed that Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo were all affected, though most SEO efforts are targeted at Google. Legendary 19th-century bandit Frank James supposedly said that he robbed banks “because that’s where the money is,” and the same logic applies to Google because of its search dominance. To Google’s credit it fights back brilliantly, and with some success; but you might find DuckDuckGo a better source for product reviews precisely because it’s less of a target.
Improving Online Privacy With DuckDuckGo
If you’re ready to test drive DuckDuckGo as your preferred search option, you can do that by:
- installing its Android or iOS app on your mobile device, or
- setting it as your browser’s default search engine.
Click the appropriate link here for instructions to do that in Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Edge.
For maximum privacy protection, you can add DuckDuckGo’s browser extension to your preferred browser. Installing the extension in your browser takes just a few clicks, and you can find instructions for the major browsers on DuckDuckGo’s browser extension help page.
The extension provides a variety of services, including tracker blocking, automatically directing you to the encrypted version of a page where one exists, and grading the sites you visit on their degree of respect for your privacy. All of this helps limit the ways that Chrome, Edge, and other sites can harvest your data. Alternatively, you can use the standalone DuckDuckGo browser for iOS, Android, Windows, or Mac.
The company also has a new feature called Email Protection, which you can enable in the DuckDuckGo app, browser, or browser extensions to strip trackers and other undesirable elements out of your incoming emails. It’s still in the testing stage at the time of this writing, but it’s open to the public if you want to try it out.
Is DuckDuckGo Safe?
The short answer is “Yes,” DuckDuckGo is as safe to use as any other app or search engine, and more so than most. There’s never been any hint of the app or site being compromised, and – even if it was – because the company doesn’t store or track your data, there’s little hackers could gain by breaching the company itself.
Of course, its search product has limitations. As we’ve said, its results will fall short of Google’s or Bing’s as a direct result of its privacy stance. Also, like Google and Bing, there are some kinds of data it simply can’t access: if you want to find out who’s behind a given email address or phone number, for example, you’d still need to use specialized search tools like Spokeo’s people search engine.
Switching to DuckDuckGo isn’t a magical silver bullet for online privacy, but it can definitely help.