DuckDuckGo
Web search that does not build a personal profile of you.
Cost
Completely free
Free, no account.
Open source
No
The code is private. You depend on the company that makes it.
Your data
Goes to their servers
Your files and text are sent to the company running the service.
Use it for this
Searching without personalised results, and when you want to see what a query returns for someone who is not you.
Do not use it for this
Local results and highly specific long-tail queries, where the index is generally thinner than Google's.
A moment where you would reach for it
Checking whether a result you are seeing is genuinely ranked highly, or just personalised to your history.
How hard is it to pick up?
Anyone can use this on day one.
Worth knowing before you use it
Does not store personal search history or build an advertising profile. Its own privacy policy is the authority on current practice.
Other things that do this job
No tool is best at everything. These solve a similar problem, with different trade-offs.
About this entry
Checked on 1 Sept 2026. Prices and free limits change without warning, and often quietly. Treat everything above as a starting point and confirm on the official site before you rely on it.
Nothing here is sponsored. A tool appears because it solves a real problem, not because someone paid for it to be listed.