# DuckDuckGo 286 Hacker News commenters recommended DuckDuckGo and 204 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 12 of 13 months; owners who said how long report a median of 3.5 years (47 owners). **Verdict:** A free, privacy-focused search engine that many find good enough now that Google has declined, with options to turn off AI; critics find results weaker than Google's. ## Why people recommend it - Good enough as Google declines (9 comments): "most of the time it's just that google has the site i want higher in the ordering than DDG. personally i'm fine scrolling down a little bit more" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49252131)) "Whether DuckDuckGo, Kagi, Ecosia or anything else, they are all objectively and verifiably better search engines than Google" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46306254)) "I've been using duckduckgo exclusively for two weeks now, and I haven't needed to go back to Google even once yet." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49256703)) - Trusted for privacy (4 comments): "Startpage, DDG, Brave, Ublock, NextDNS, Proton, Mulvad, and all those similar companies and OSS exist literally because people were infuriated at the Big Tech bait-and-switch tactics" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46097352)) "DuckDuckGo has been a privacy champion for years, so I would give them far more weight in actually adhering to these policies" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47169090)) "I like with DDG is that it doesn't seem to return different results depending on the profile it has on you" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50016163)) - AI and suggestions can be disabled (4 comments): "That's orders of magnitude better than anything else, and really the best you can do short of refusing to use any AI at all." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48360215)) "DuckDuckGo gives you enough control in its settings to completely filter out AI-anything in search results." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48217364)) "you can turn the AI off at least and still have your search engine and chatbot be separate tools" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49872462)) - Simple, JS-free alternative interfaces (2 comments): "still offers a perfectly usable JS-free search engine if you visit the website from a browser with no/disabled JS support" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45829897)) "If you don't like all the fluff on the results page, DDG provides two alternative interfaces with much simpler layouts." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46259494)) ## What people warn about - Results less complete than Google (5 comments): "DuckDuckGo is fine for quickly getting to well known sites where I can't remember the URL, but it's objectively worse for trying to find everything from Reddit threads to Recipes." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47185353)) "Yeah we have Kagi and DDG, but quality, completeness of results (for most topics) and cost still drives most people to Google." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47845454)) "I have been using DDG for years and even with Google quality having plunged it is neither better nor less expensive" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45897806)) - Slow, unreliable AI summaries (4 comments): "It frequently gets things exactly backwards and is clearly leaning on its internal model a lot more than the links it has supposedly read" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48377919)) "it would begin a painfully slow crawl of text that pushed the results I was actually interested in further and further down the page" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48359600)) "Seeing another search company trending towards Ai centric means, to me, they are not focused on search quality any more." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46266142)) - Poor local search results (2 comments): "it has the same limitation as Duck and basically all of the other non-enormous-players in the search engine market: Location aware search is garbage." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48268084)) "I always get highly irrelevant local results for stupid shit, eg hotels, restaurants and things too bizarre to remember." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46686694)) - Autocorrect overrides exact queries (2 comments): "search term autocorrect is really broken when DDG decides for me I must not be looking for exactly what I typed" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46263857)) "The image search is terrible on DDG. If I search for multiple keywords, the search only cares if an image matches just one word." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47185486)) ## Alternatives hackers recommend - [Kagi](https://hackerapproved.com/p/kagi.md): 732 recommend - [SearXNG](https://hackerapproved.com/p/searxng.md): 76 recommend - [Brave Search](https://hackerapproved.com/p/brave-search.md): 67 recommend - [Startpage](https://hackerapproved.com/p/startpage.md): 25 recommend - [Qwant](https://hackerapproved.com/p/qwant.md): 22 recommend ## Where to get it - [Visit the official site](https://duckduckgo.com/) ## Cite as Hacker Approved, "DuckDuckGo", https://hackerapproved.com/p/duckduckgo/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).