I ditched Google Search for a service that actually respects my privacy

"Small tech" is having its moment. There has been a substantial increase in people switching to community-driven software that is built to serve its users, rather than suits at large faceless organizations. A few examples of such software include the note-taking app Obsidian, the image editing tool GIMP, and the decentralized social media network Mastodon.

When it comes to search engines, Google has hovered around 90% market share for more than a decade. However, this doesn't mean that alternative search engines are suffering. In fact, many users, including me, have switched to privacy-first alternatives like DuckDuckGo, which saw growth of 30.5% on May 25 (after Google I/O 2026), according to Thurrott. And for good reason.

DuckDuckGo isn't profiling me with each search

The occasional irrelevant ad is a small price to pay for privacy

Google's business model still relies on ads. Your activity across Google products, such as web search, YouTube, and Google Maps, is used to create a detailed profile of you, which Google uses to serve you targeted ads. In fact, this profiling isn't limited to your activity on Google apps; Google also tracks you across third-party websites that use Google Analytics and Ads.

DuckDuckGo, too, serves ads. However, these ads are contextual and not based on your search history or web activity. It's not logging your IP addresses and other unique identifiers, nor is it creating a detailed history of what you search for and your search behavior. The ads you see simply depend on what you searched for. Additionally, these ads won't follow you around as you visit other websites. You can also access an even more secure Tor version of DuckDuckGo for added peace of mind.

Google wants to know everything about you, and your activity is tied to your Google account. Sure, you can turn off some tracking features, but I don't really trust Google, considering that just last year, a federal jury ordered them to pay $425 million for tracking users' data even after they had disabled tracking features on their accounts.

DuckDuckGo's AI features are optional

And done better than Google's

At this point, Google Gemini is more like a Hydra, with its many heads stuffed into every Google product imaginable. The worst offender is Google Search: I need to scroll through the gigantic AI Overview before seeing any actual results, and Google doesn't offer any way to turn it off by default. I would be okay with Google's AI Overview if it didn't hallucinate as much as it does. But in its current state, I'd rather open a web result that gives me accurate info.

DuckDuckGo has AI features too, but it lets you opt in to them instead of force-enabling them. The first AI feature is Duck.ai, which lets you converse with AI models from Anthropic, OpenAI, and others. The other AI feature is Search Assist, which is similar to Google's AI Overview and appears only when the search term requires it (for example, if you're asking a straightforward question).

You can access DuckDuckGo's AI features by clicking the Duck.ai button in the top-right corner of its homepage, or clicking the Ask AI button on the search bar itself. To enable or modify Search Assist, go to Settings -> AI Features, and click the drop-down menu next to Search Assist to choose how often you want AI overviews in your searches.

Better customization than Google Search

DuckDuckGo lets you choose fonts, colors, and layout

Google offers very little in terms of customizing how Search looks and behaves. You get SafeSearch, region and language, dark mode, preferred sources (which DuckDuckGo lacks), and that's mostly it.

On the other hand, DuckDuckGo lets you make the search results page truly yours. You can modify the theme with full color customization, page width, toggle center alignment, URL format, snippet length, and more by going to Settings -> Appearance.

DuckDuckGo has some useful quality-of-life features, too. For instance, you can disable AI-generated images from showing up in the search results altogether. You can also enable scrolling if you dislike having to go through multiple pages, as you do on Google's search results page.

Google Search is still better at some things

While DuckDuckGo has improved over the years, it still lags behind Google in some areas. There's still no reverse image feature in DuckDuckGo, unlike Google's, which is the industry standard. In fact, Google's image search results page is vastly superior to DuckDuckGo's. Additionally, Google is much better for news, too, thanks to Google News, whose news aggregation is unmatched.