This is because the company uses Microsoft's Bing to power its search results. The presence of Microsoft trackers seemed to fly in the face of the search engine's privacy promise, and DuckDuckGo's founder and CEO clarified on Reddit that the company was 'currently contractually restricted by Microsoft' from stopping Microsoft scripts from completely loading. DuckDuckGo saves you the extra steps of manually navigating to encrypted connections.ĭuckDuckGo was criticized in May 2022 when researchers discovered some Microsoft tracking scripts while using DuckDuckGo's browsers. This is another scenario where both options (encrypted and unencrypted) exist on other search engines, but the default isn't always the privacy-friendly option.

Searches made through DuckDuckGo also automatically connect you to the encrypted versions of websites wherever possible, making it harder for anyone else to see what you're looking at online. (That's the basis of every ' embarrassing search history' joke.) Instead of making you navigate to a different version of its app, DuckDuckGo never tracks your search history. Other browsers, including Chrome, allow you to use private or incognito windows that don't track your search history, but their default windows do. Read more: Best VPNs of 2023 How does DuckDuckGo work?įor starters, DuckDuckGo does not track searches made through its browser extension or mobile app. Here's what you need to know about DuckDuckGo and how it tries to keep your searches more secure. While it doesn't track users, DuckDuckGo's app was downloaded more than 50 million times between July 2020 and June 2021 - more than all other years combined since its 2008 launch. But DuckDuckGo - which has spent heavily on an advertising campaign - sees itself as a direct competitor to Google Search, complete with a mobile app and extensions for Chrome, Firefox, Safari and other browsers, as well as a Mac browser in public beta.Īfter major incidents like the Cambridge Analytica scandal, people have become more aware of how much personal information is available to tech companies and advertisers - and are opting out of being tracked when they can. There are other private browsers, such as Brave and the Mullvad Browser, that block others from monitoring your online activity. Enter DuckDuckGo, a search engine that pledges to keep your search activity anonymous and not track you online. Sometimes, you just want a little privacy in your browsing. You search for a product or click an advertisement once, and then ads seem to follow you to the ends of the internet, even across devices.

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