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I did not submit to this to Hacker News. I wrote it for my audience on my newsletter.

We = DuckDuckGo. As the article notes, we are increasingly relying on our own search technology. For example, our Search Assist (our version of AI overviews), local results (maps, business listings, etc.), knowledge graph stuff (wikipedia, answers, etc.) don't come from Bing. That said, if Bing happens to removes something, we can add it back, which we do. We do not censor anything ouselves.

We actually have, as part of https://natlawreview.com/article/nad-examines-privacy-statem... "The NAD found the claims supported by the evidence which included a third-party expert confirming that the company’s measures (encryption, tracker blocking, and private searches) protect against the three largest categories of personal data collectors."

In terms of money, as the article notes we have 3% of U.S. search market share. That's a lot if you consider how much Google makes. Now, in part because of our search privacy, we make way way less, but it is still enough to be profitable. That said, that means we could be way way more profitable if we tracked people, which we don't.

A primary problem is we get overwhelingly spammed with submissions. They are not completely ignored. We have maintainers, but as a relatively small team given the surface area of what we're working on, they have been de-prioritized. That said, I think some better tooling could probably get be put in place at this point to help us.

Aggregate anonymous statistics, for example, requery rates/times, bounce back rates/times, etc.

We never blocked this image and we would have no incentive to either since we’ve been banned in China since 2014. Here’s my statement from back then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27528324

All our different search metrics have been up over time, so would love to know more about specifics if you'd care to reach out to me (email in profile) and we can look into it more deeply.

We have actually started doing a lot more crawling and indexing in the last 24 months.

FYI if you're curious, our full list of 2025 donations are here, $1.1M to 29 orgs: https://spreadprivacy.com/2025-duckduckgo-charitable-donatio.... Historical donations (going back to 2011) are here: https://duckduckgo.com/donations

There are hundreds of logo easter eggs. The community has been cataloging ones they can find: https://makdulac.com/daxduckdex.html

Thanks (author here). I am working on a follow-up post (and likely posts) with specific recommendations.

Yup. We still do (at DuckDuckGo), though now also alongside a bunch of other languages.

This title is highly misleading, implying that Google tracks DuckDuckGo searches directly, which isn’t true. It also reinforces a conspiracy theory that we’re owned by Google, which also of course isn’t true. Kindly please change it to be more accurate about Google analytics and other Google trackers on websites you may visit.

We’ve been sounding the alarm about Google analytics, tag manager, and other Google trackers for years and why we started making our own extensions and browsers to block them and provide more comprehensive protection. On our homepage and everywhere else we can we try to get people to install those to get that additional protection, which you can compare here: https://duckduckgo.com/compare-privacy

I'm seeing that as our first result.

The settings don’t change, but they are stored in anonymous local storage, so if that is cleared they go away. If you use our browsers though this is managed through the browser.

FWIW we (DuckDuckGo) have largely moved in another direction for news results, at least in the US so far.

Now, the first few times you interact with Assist, a dialogue automatically appears asking you how much you want it to show.

There is noai, html, and lite (and even lighter variant of html).

Thanks! I really appreciate your comment.

If you disable Assist from the inline dialogue, there is a message that comes up about it, but I agree we need to show that in more places, like in the settings screen.

We also offer https://noai.duckduckgo.com/ which is just regular DuckDuckGo with AI features turned off.

I think they meant our browser.

For what it's worth, we produce our own summaries, and you can turn them off if you don't like them. We also offer noai.duckduckgo.com, which turns all of our AI features off automatically.

If you're looking for justifications as to why, I posted the other day at https://gabrielweinberg.com/p/science-funding-was-already-wa... outlining eleven of them: longevity (living longer), defense (wars of the future), returns (pays for itself), prosperity (only real long-term driver of productivity growth), innovation (better everday products), resilience (insurance for future calamities), jobs (creates them now and better jobs in the future), frontier (sci-fi is cool), sovereignty (reduce single points of failure), environment (new tech needed for climate change and energy efficiency), and power (maintaining reserve currency, among other things).

Thank you. That’s really helpful and I appreciate it. !g isn’t a great signal actually.

We are not just a "reskinned rebranded Bing." I know we're talking about search here, but to be clear DuckDuckGo is way more than search at this point and that is a large part of why we are popular. For example, we have a browser, duck.ai, VPN, email protection, app tracking protection, etc. We were first known for search (and maybe mostly on this forum since that's where I started), but we're now popular for all this other stuff as well that works to keep you more generally protected (see https://duckduckgo.com/compare-privacy).

In search in particular, search results have been more than web links since the early 2000s when instant answers started to appear on Yahoo. Since then, more and more of the page is instant answers of one kind or another (aka search modules, oneboxes, etc.) and less and less of it is traditional web links.

AI-assisted answers has accelerated this even more in the past two years, and we get 0 of that from Bing. Same with knowledge graph answers before that (e.g., info from Wikipedia and other quick facts, which became the most prevalent search module on desktop), again, 0 from Bing. And same for the most prevalent search module on mobile too — local results — 0 from Bing.

That is to say, a lot of our search results content is not coming from Bing. We have hundreds of team members and millions of lines of search code at this point. We’re constantly working on search, and looking to improve it. We post updates quarterly to https://duckduckgo.com/updates (along with updates on our other products and services).

In terms of traditional web links, yes, we primarily use Bing as an input in the same way Kagi primarily uses Google as an input. As Vlad has said publicly (most recently heard him on The Talk Show) and has been made clear from this US v Google case from Google/Bing/Apple/OpenAI/etc. testimony, it costs upwards of a billion dollars a year to maintain a competitive index of web links. Only the biggest companies can afford that. Nevertheless, we still work on actively crawling and indexing, but the reality is small companies cannot do it all themselves. In fact, that's true for most products in most industries -- they rely on a supply chain for various components, some of them critical.

Finally, even if you have the same traditional links, but you put instant answers above or beside or in between them, change the design significantly, or otherwise add to them (all of which we do), then the actual user experience of the search results ends up being significantly different in terms of how it is perceived and what people click on. For the latter, people engage with a section above another section about twice as much, so for example, if you just put a different box/answer on top you've drastically changed the experience of the search engine.

Do you have specific examples of this behavior that I can look into? Also, curious if you've tried our Assist function (comes up automatically for some searches or click Assist under search box) or duck.ai for stuff like that?

Thank you for providing an example we can look into. If you have other thoughts, please also feel free to share them with me, and I'll take them back to the team. My email is in my profile if that method is preferred. Despite what some people think, we do a lot of the search results ourselves and we're constantly working to improve our search experience. We post quarterly updates to https://duckduckgo.com/updates

Any particular results/examples we can look into? Feel free to email me if preferred (see profile).

FWIW All DuckDuckGo telemetry is completely anonymous: https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/privacy/atb