European Alternatives to DuckDuckGo

Why people leave DuckDuckGo

DuckDuckGo is the default private search engine for a very large audience.

By its own count it handles 3 billion searches a month, it is built into the browsers of Apple and Mozilla, and it has grown from a search box into an all-in-one privacy product: a free browser for Mac, Windows, iOS and Android, an email forwarding service, tracker blocking for other apps and a private chat tool called Duck.ai. Almost everything it says about not following you is specific, and it has been saying it since 2010.

The company behind it is Duck Duck Go, Inc., which describes itself in its terms as independent since it was founded in 2008.

Its headquarters are in Paoli, Pennsylvania, its terms are governed by New York law and any claim must be filed in the state or federal courts of New York. For a person in Europe, that is a US contracting party, whatever the privacy policy promises about logging. A promise is a policy; where a dispute goes is a jurisdiction.

People who leave are usually not leaving because of a privacy scandal. They want results that do not come from Bing, a search engine and browser that sit under European law, or a funder they can see: a non-profit, a foundation, a donation model. The truthful starting point is that DuckDuckGo is good at what it does, so the question is what you would accept giving up.

• Its links are mostly Bing results with a privacy layer DuckDuckGo's own help page on result sources says the traditional links and images are largely sourced from Bing, with its own DuckDuckBot crawler and many indexes behind the Instant Answers. A request to a partner is proxied so the partner sees DuckDuckGo, not you. The privacy is real. The index is still a Microsoft one, so anyone who wants a different view of the web gets it from Mojeek, Qwant or a metasearch engine.
• The contract is American The terms of service name Duck Duck Go, Inc., apply New York law and send every claim to New York courts. They also cap its liability at what you paid in the previous 12 months, or 100 dollars if you paid nothing. Qwant, Ecosia and MetaGer are contracted in France and Germany, and the DSA complaints route DuckDuckGo lists for EEA users is an email address at its US company.
• Ads on the results page come from a partner DuckDuckGo says the majority of its revenue comes from private ads on its search engine, and its help pages include a section on ads by Microsoft. The ads are matched to the results page rather than a profile, which is a long way from Google's model. It does mean the advertising chain on a DuckDuckGo results page runs through a US partner, which an engine such as MetaGer, funded by prepaid keys and donations, does not have.
• It has become a larger product than search The about page now leads with a browser, Duck.ai, email protection and tracker blocking, and the help pages list a paid subscription. If you only wanted a private search box, you now carry the vocabulary and settings of a product suite. A smaller engine such as Mojeek, Qwant or eTools.ch is a box and a result list, and that is a feature for some people.

What you have to replace, not just match

The search box is the easy part. Setting another engine as the default in Chrome, Firefox, Safari or Edge takes a minute, and every engine on this page works with a browser extension or a manual search URL. What you give up is mostly habit: the !bang shortcuts that jump straight to Wikipedia or a shop have no one-to-one equivalent elsewhere, so list the half dozen you actually type and look for a custom search shortcut in your browser.

The bigger decision is the browser. If you use the DuckDuckGo app, you rely on its built-in tracker blocking, its Fire Button for erasing tabs and data, and Duck Player for YouTube. Vivaldi, from Norway, has an ad and tracker blocker built in, encrypted sync and its own mail, calendar and feed reader, but it does not replicate all of those DuckDuckGo-specific features, and it carries more interface than DuckDuckGo's deliberately simple browser.

The third piece is anything else you attached to DuckDuckGo. If you use Duck Addresses for forwarding email, App Tracking Protection on Android or Duck.ai, none of the engines on this page offers those, because they are search engines or a browser, not privacy suites. Decide which of those you would replace with a European mail forwarder or a different tool, and which you will simply stop using.

The alternatives compared

How each alternative compares to DuckDuckGo

What actually breaks when you switch

Start with the data that lives in DuckDuckGo. Its Sync & Backup feature, saved searches settings and any Duck Addresses are tied to a DuckDuckGo account or device, so export bookmarks and passwords from the DuckDuckGo browser before you uninstall it, and move forwarded email to a new address before you delete the old one. Nothing in the search engines on this page needs an account, so the switch itself loses no stored data.

The friction is in muscle memory. Results are ordered differently, local results need more explicit wording, and !bang shortcuts disappear. Plan a week of using the new default for everything and note which queries you retry on DuckDuckGo. If the same few fail, a metasearch engine such as MetaGer or eTools.ch, which asks several sources, usually fixes it more cleanly than going back.

Is DuckDuckGo really private, and why switch if it is?

On its own pages, yes. The privacy policy says DuckDuckGo does not save your IP address alongside searches, chats or visits, never logs a unique identifier that could be tied back to you, and keeps anonymous query data only to study search trends. The company also states that it makes most of its money from ads based on the results page rather than a profile.

Switching is therefore not about a leak. It is about three other things: whose index you search, whose law governs the agreement, and whether you want that functionality supplied by a European company. If none of those matters to you, DuckDuckGo is a good reason to stay.

Which of these engines will give me different results, not just a different logo?

Mojeek is the clearest answer, because it runs its own crawler and index, so the ranking is not Bing's. Expect a smaller index and thinner coverage of long-tail queries. eTools.ch and MetaGer take a different route: they ask many engines at once, so no single index decides the order, and results are as good as the sources you configure.

Qwant sits in between, with its own crawler for part of the index and partner results for the rest. Ecosia, Lilo and Swisscows lean on Bing, with Ecosia also using Google and EUSP depending on country and device, so they look more like DuckDuckGo than the first three do.

Which one to pick

If you want the closest swap, choose Qwant for a French company with EU hosting and a partial crawler, or Ecosia if you want the same free model with a German steward-owned company. If your concern is that the results are Bing's, choose Mojeek for a separate index or MetaGer and eTools.ch for many sources at once.

For families and schools, Swisscows is the only filter that cannot be removed. For the browser, Vivaldi replaces the DuckDuckGo app but not its email or chat extras. Lilo is a small-scale option for people who want donations and Bing results. Where DuckDuckGo is still stronger is the breadth of its product and its !bang shortcuts, so keep it if those matter more than where the company sits.