The biggest name in private search deserves your attention. DuckDuckGo (DDG) has a simple privacy policy: “We don’t collect or share any of your personal information.” The search interface is simple, too, and results are on target, though they lack the extensive info panels found in Bing and Google. DDG lets you search for images, videos, news, maps, and shopping results. A nice touch is that DDG adds more header options depending on the search term, such as Definition, Meanings, Nutrition, and Recipes.
The search service now includes two AI features: Assist, which generates a summary of answers for your query, and Duck.ai Chat. The first is similar to AI features in Bing, Brave, and Google. It summarizes web results to give you an answer at the top of the page so that you don’t have to hunt down that nugget of information on multiple websites. Duck.ai lets you have a conversation with a chatbot that uses anonymized content from prominent AI models, such as GPT, Claude, Mistral, and Llama. It doesn’t use your input for training.
My tracker blocker, uBlock, reported trackers on DuckDuckGo result pages, though they were from DDG itself. For the ultimate in privacy, DDG offers a Tor.onion version of its search engine. If you like this search engine, be sure to check out its private browser as well!
