DuckDuckGo

★★★★☆

A search engine with related services and apps offering better privacy than the other big names. Search is currently serving less slop than Google. Disposable email aliases are convenient. The browser extension and standalone browser block known trackers, and the mobile app (at least on Android) can block trackers in other apps too.

Search

★★★★☆

It’s been a few years since I mostly switched from Google to DuckDuckGo for search. It used to be slightly worse in terms of search result quality, but it was a trade-off: Google tracked you and personalized your results, while DuckDuckGo was missing context because it wasn’t tracking you. Since then, search quality has gotten worse across the board as clickbait, content farms, and finally AI slop cluttered up the net. But Google’s results have dropped more: first they put the advertising execs in charge of search, sacrificing quality to keep people on their services, and now they’re going full chatbot.

At least for now, DuckDuckGo is returning slightly better results than Google.

DDG has been rolling out AI summaries, but not on everything, and at least its summaries cite their sources (unlike Google’s). Just as with Wikipedia, citations are critical to evaluating whether the summary is accurate or not!

Like most search engines not called Google, Bing or Yandex, DuckDuckGo remixes results from bigger general sites and smaller, more specific search sites. For the most part, since you’re not contacting Bing or TripAdvisor or wherever directly, it insulates you from tracking by the data sources they use.

Email Protection

★★★★☆

Duck.com is a free email forwarding service that filters known trackers out of your email before sending it on to your real mailbox. It also has a feature to randomly generate disposable aliases, which is useful for when you need to give a site an email address, but don’t know whether you can trust the site not to spam you or share your address with more spammers.

I’m still ambivalent about anything that alters incoming messages (other than stripping out malware), but the disposable addresses are nice:

• You can deactivate them individually, unlike a catch-all.
• Unlike plus-addressing, they can’t just be cleaned up to get your real address.
• Creating them is instant.

On the downside, you do need to watch out for duplicates when you’re already subscribed to something at your real address.

Browser Extensions

★★★☆☆

DuckDuckGo Privacy Essentials is an add-on for Chromium/Firefox browsers. It’s kind of like Privacy Badger in that it blocks trackers, adds don’t-sell-my-info flags, and blocks some social media embeds. But while it’s happy to tell you what it has blocked, it’s hard to find out what it will block. The main advantage it has over Privacy Badger and newer browser settings is that it detects email address fields and offers to generate a disposable alias right there.

Mobile App

★★★★☆

A few years ago DuckDuckGo launched a mobile browser for Android. I just changed the search engine on Firefox and Vivaldi, but my wife’s been using the app for quite a while, largely because it also cuts down on tracking by third-party sites.

I finally decided to give it a shot after trying out Ecosia, and my first impression is that it really wants me to know how much it’s doing to make things less annoying for me. Fortunately those notifications trickle off and stop fairly quickly.

The browser itself is fairly bare-bones, and it’s important to remember that it blocks tracking, not ads. It’s also missing things like reader mode. But at least it lets you move the nav bar to the bottom.

But it does add some other features you won’t find in Ecosia or other apps (or are harder to get at):

• A burn button that closes all your tabs and wipes your history and its saved data (except for sites you “fireproof”)
• Auto-generating disposable email aliases if you use a Duck address.
• Duck Player, which opens YouTube videos without your Google account, and without targeted ads, and without adding them to your YouTube recommendations.

And then there’s “App Tracking Protection,” an option to filter outbound traffic to trackers from other apps (their example is a fitness app contacting Facebook). It runs as a local VPN on your phone, so it doesn’t need root. The downside to that approach: it interferes with trying to connect to an actual VPN if you need to. It’s interesting to see just how much some apps try to phone home, even when they’re supposed to be sleeping.

Desktop Browser

★★★☆☆

Somehow I didn’t notice until recently that they’ve released a DuckDuckGo desktop browser for macOS and Windows. It’s a custom application built around the system rendering engines, so it uses Chromium on Windows and WebKit on macOS. All the features of the browser extension are included, from tracker blocking to email alias generation.

Otherwise it’s pretty sparse, though it does include the burn button and Duck Player. There’s no extensions support, which means I can’t integrate it with KeePassXC or Floccus (for syncing with other browsers). Bookmarks sync only with other installs of the DDG browser, using a recovery key instead of an account, similar to Brave.

Controversy

I know there have been other controversies, but most of the commentary I’ve been able to find while looking for it stems from one of the following:

1. The mobile browser used to allow Microsoft trackers until they renegotiated their contract with Bing. The question here is whether you believe it’s more likely that they’ve pulled their act together or that there are more problems waiting to be discovered.

2. They down-ranked Russian propaganda outlets early in the Ukraine invasion, and certain very vocal people decided it must be political censorship and not just, y’know, downranking the low-quality results.

3. It’s not a perfect privacy solution. Well, of course not! If you need more serious privacy, use Tor. Most people’s threat model can get by with something that’s at least more private than Chrome+Google or Edge+Bing.