I’ve Been Using DuckDuckGo Search for Two Weeks and the World Didn’t End (Premium)

Two weeks ago, I configured DuckDuckGo as the default search engine in Brave, which promptly synced that setting to all my PCs. This isn't the first time I've experimented with an alternative---meaning, non-Google---Internet search provider, of course. But this experience has been unique in one important way: I've stuck with it because the results have always met my needs.

And to be clear, that is unique. I find it amusing whenever someone tells me that they use Bing regularly and I find it freaking hilarious when they tell me it's as good as or---sorry, I just snorted---even better than Google. That's nonsense, and I know that because I routinely check in on Bing, especially this past year with all the AI advances, and I have always gone running back to the familiar and superior results I get from Google. Immediately.

Indeed, my experiences with Bing parallel my experiences with the Mac. I'm curious, of course. And yet it doesn't take even a minute before I have that "oh, right" moment that instantly reminds me why I use what I use. In each case, I wonder if this is the time. And in each case, it is not.

Given this, you may naturally assume I have something definitive to say about why DuckDuckGo passes muster in ways that Bing---and other alternatives I've tried, like Brave Search---fall short. And I do … and I don't. It's this simple: Where the results I see in Bing routinely send me back to Google, the results I see in DuckDuckGo do not. I search, I get answers or relevant links, and I get on with what I'm doing. It … just works.

This is impressive to me because I'm pretty critical when it comes to the tools I use, and I went into this intending to experiment with a variety of search services and fully expected each to be lackluster and not worth discussing. Indeed, I wasn't going to write about this experience at all. I do this kind of experimentation all the time and I'm not often surprised this way.

Curious, I took a peek at the DuckDuckGo Blog to see if I'd missed something. DuckDuckGo was founded by Gabriel Weinberg over 15 years ago specifically as a privacy-respecting, user-centric alternative to Google Search. Ignoring its other products and services for a moment, though they are of interest as well, I researched the advances it's made over the past few years. And there are many, especially related to the expansion of private search, but nothing unexpected.

We write about DuckDuckGo regularly on Thurrott.com, of course, so I also checked that, but most of the recent news has been about the company's web browser, which is still incomplete on Windows, and a single AI feature was the only search-related news from this past year. DuckDuckGo got in some hot water last year when we learned that it was silently allowing Microsoft to track users through its mobile web browsers and desktop browser extensions, but it halted that practice and is now more in line with how Brave works.

And ... I'm not sure what to sa...