DuckDuckGo

Long-term owners

I have been using DuckDuckGo for 2 years once I noticed search results are the same or better than Google

Feb 2026 · comment

What hackers pick instead

• KagiA paid search engine people choose for cleaner results without ads or tracking, with domain blocking, customization and opt-in AI answers; critics object to its Yandex data and pricing.732recommend
• SearXNGSelf-hosted metasearch engine that blends results from many engines without ads, tracking or AI summaries. Common caveat: upstream engines often rate limit or block it.76recommend
• Brave SearchPeople recommend it as a private search engine with its own independent index, optional AI answers, and no forced AI. Critics say its results are sometimes weaker than Google's.67recommend
• StartpagePrivate search that gives anonymous access to Google results and is a popular fallback. Critics say results trail Google and it is owned by an advertising company.25recommend
• QwantRecommended as a European alternative to Google that sometimes gives better results, though critics say it omits results Google finds and copies Google's interface.22recommend

Every quote

The 40 most detailed of 617 comments. Each links to the original.

1. 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

   Recommends · Nov 2025 · in “Leak confirms OpenAI is preparing ads on ChatGPT for public roll out”

2. 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.

   Mixed · Feb 2026 · in “Leaving Google has actively improved my life”

3. 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

   Recommends · Aug 2026 · in “Google Search Is Dying. What Comes Next Is Worse”

4. It frequently gets things exactly backwards and is clearly leaning on its internal model a lot more than the links it has supposedly read

   Mixed · Jun 2026 · in “Gmail thinks I'm stupid, so I left”

5. it would begin a painfully slow crawl of text that pushed the results I was actually interested in further and further down the page

   Mixed · Jun 2026 · in “DuckDuckGo makes its 'no-AI' search engine easier to access as its traffic booms”

6. Yeah we have Kagi and DDG, but quality, completeness of results (for most topics) and cost still drives most people to Google.

   Mixed · Apr 2026 · in “OpenAI ad partner now selling ChatGPT ad placements based on "prompt relevance"”

7. DuckDuckGo has been a privacy champion for years, so I would give them far more weight in actually adhering to these policies

   Recommends · Feb 2026 · in “How Will OpenAI Compete?”

8. 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.

   Recommends · Jun 2026 · in “DuckDuckGo makes its 'no-AI' search engine easier to access as its traffic booms”

9. Whether DuckDuckGo, Kagi, Ecosia or anything else, they are all objectively and verifiably better search engines than Google

   Recommends · Dec 2025 · in “Gemini 3 Flash: Frontier intelligence built for speed”

10. still offers a perfectly usable JS-free search engine if you visit the website from a browser with no/disabled JS support

    Recommends · Nov 2025 · in “Dillo, a multi-platform graphical web browser”

11. If you don't like all the fluff on the results page, DDG provides two alternative interfaces with much simpler layouts.

    Recommends · Dec 2025 · in “Some surprising things about DuckDuckGo”

12. I have been using DDG for years and even with Google quality having plunged it is neither better nor less expensive

    Mixed · Nov 2025 · in “SoftBank sells its entire stake in Nvidia”

13. I've been using duckduckgo exclusively for two weeks now, and I haven't needed to go back to Google even once yet.

    Recommends · Aug 2026 · in “Google Search Is Dying. What Comes Next Is Worse”

14. search term autocorrect is really broken when DDG decides for me I must not be looking for exactly what I typed

    Mixed · Dec 2025 · in “Some surprising things about DuckDuckGo”

15. DDG is a mediocre search engine. A mediocre search engine is still much better than whatever Google's become.

    Mixed · May 2026 · in “Search engines alternatives now that Google isn't Google anymore”

16. DuckDuckGo gives you enough control in its settings to completely filter out AI-anything in search results.

    Recommends · May 2026 · in “Apparently Google hates us now”

17. I like with DDG is that it doesn't seem to return different results depending on the profile it has on you

    Recommends · Oct 2026 · in “Stop complaining about enshittification. Use the alternatives”

18. I have been using DuckDuckGo for 2 years once I noticed search results are the same or better than Google

    Recommends · Feb 2026 · in “Anthropic officially bans using subscription auth for third party use”

19. I've been using DuckDuckGo for about a year now and have found myself satisfied with the experience.

    Recommends · May 2026 · in “Google officially announces that ads will be included in AI Mode search results”

20. I find everything I'm looking for just fine, and the AI summaries are actually helpful on occasion.

    Recommends · Sep 2026 · in “When did Google get so weird?”

21. I trust DDG significantly more than Google and I am happy that you guys could read such feedback!

    Recommends · Mar 2026 · in “I'm losing the SEO battle for my own open source project”

22. Google's results quality has deteriorated so much that I won't lose anything of value by doing so

    Recommends · Sep 2026 · in “google.com/goto: Google's anti-scraping update”

23. Google search had degraded so badly pre-AI, I was already finding it equivalent for most things.

    Recommends · May 2026 · in “DuckDuckGo search saw 28% more visits after Google said people love AI mode”

24. you can turn the AI off at least and still have your search engine and chatbot be separate tools

    Mixed · Sep 2026 · in “When did Google get so weird?”

25. I'm also REALLY happy to see that you can actively disable not just adds but also suggestions

    Recommends · May 2026 · in “Search engines alternatives now that Google isn't Google anymore”

26. 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.

    Criticizes · May 2026 · in “Search engines alternatives now that Google isn't Google anymore”

27. I have to qualify searches with multiple negations to get anything of interest to someone with more than high school education and interests.

    Criticizes · May 2026 · in “I'm So Tired of Ads”

28. The image search is terrible on DDG. If I search for multiple keywords, the search only cares if an image matches just one word.

    Criticizes · Feb 2026 · in “Leaving Google has actively improved my life”

29. Seeing another search company trending towards Ai centric means, to me, they are not focused on search quality any more.

    Criticizes · Dec 2025 · in “Some surprising things about DuckDuckGo”

30. useful meta descriptions or keyword matches sidelined in favour of what I presume is Microsoft-generated clickbaity slop

    Criticizes · Dec 2025 · in “I announced my divorce on Instagram and then AI impersonated me”

31. I always get highly irrelevant local results for stupid shit, eg hotels, restaurants and things too bizarre to remember.

    Criticizes · Jan 2026 · in “We've Turned Off AI‑Assisted Answers”

32. I felt like I had to add “!g” to everything, which doesn’t actually move one away from Google, it just creates friction.

    Criticizes · Feb 2026 · in “Leaving Google has actively improved my life”

33. I switched years ago, and still to this day, when I get a bad set of results... I throw a g! on it, and still get shitty results.

    Mixed · Jun 2026 · in “DuckDuckGo makes its 'no-AI' search engine easier to access as its traffic booms”

34. Now I see what happens. Batman, spiderman, superman, darth vader and donald duck also work (probably even more)! I am impressed.

    Recommends · Nov 2025 · in “The DuckDuckGo duck changes to Gaquacktus when you search for Galactus”

35. I searched for plumber's bread on DuckDuckGo and this was the 3rd result which seems to match what you're looking for

    Mixed · May 2026 · in “Apparently Google hates us now”

36. This works for nerds, but not for grandma who can't even describe what she's doing without using the word "google".

    Mixed · Sep 2026 · in “Android 17 is the first since 3.x to add new APIs without releasing to the AOSP”

37. One of the things I give duckduckgo a lot of credit for is that while they're quick to interrupt me for a bot check

    Recommends · May 2026 · in “Project Gutenberg – keeps getting better”

38. Duck duck go is really cool. I am almost fully rooting for them and they are my default mobile and web browser.

    Recommends · Jan 2026 · in “Waiting for dawn in search: Search index, Google rulings and impact on Kagi”

39. the links i got on duck duck go was matching that exact message whereas in google i got literally zero results

    Recommends · Jan 2026 · in “60% of Legal Searches Now End Without a Click”

40. I personally have had to use DuckDuckGo to search for things that Gemini finds to be against its instructions

    Recommends · May 2026 · in “DuckDuckGo search saw 28% more visits after Google said people love AI mode”