DuckDuckGo does not track your searches or build a profile on you. That is the core pitch. Founded in 2008 in Pennsylvania, it handles about 3 billion queries a month. Search results come mostly from Microsoft Bing, topped up by DuckDuckGo's own crawler and over 400 other sources.

The company also makes a private browser for mobile and desktop. It blocks third-party trackers, forces encrypted connections when available, and has a "Burn" button that wipes your browsing data in one tap. An Email Protection feature strips trackers from incoming messages before forwarding them to your real inbox.

Search and tracker blocking are free. A $9.99/month Privacy Pro subscription adds a VPN, data broker removal, and identity theft restoration. AI chat is included at every tier. The free version gives you GPT-4o mini and Claude Haiku. Paid plans unlock stronger models like GPT-4o and Claude Sonnet, with none of your conversations stored or used for training.

Worth knowing

DuckDuckGo is a US company, subject to the PATRIOT Act and CLOUD Act. In 2022, security researcher Zach Edwards found that its mobile browser let Microsoft tracking scripts run on third-party websites while blocking Google and Facebook trackers. The reason: a contractual deal with Microsoft, which also supplies the search results and ads. DuckDuckGo fixed it after public backlash, but the episode showed that business partnerships can override privacy promises.

Your queries travel through US infrastructure. There is no EU office and no way to keep your data under EU jurisdiction. If that matters to you, an EU-based search engine removes that uncertainty entirely.