DuckDuckGo Alternatives That Run Their Own Search Index

Short Answer

Brave Search is the closest replacement for DuckDuckGo, because it serves results from a web index Brave built itself rather than reselling someone else's. Every search engine guide we publish here starts by asking whose index the results come from, and that question sorts the list below. The engines here are picked for readers who already left Google and want off DuckDuckGo as well. If you are weighing the first of those two moves, our DuckDuckGo vs Google comparison covers it.

Two neighbouring questions have their own guides. The broad list of what you can use instead of Google sits in alternative search engines. The artificial intelligence (AI) objection on its own is covered in search engines without AI.

Three engines below crawl the web themselves: Brave Search, Mojeek and Marginalia. Two are front ends for results bought from Microsoft or Google. One charges a subscription and blends both. Sorting them that way tells you which switch changes what you see and which one only changes the logo.

What DuckDuckGo Gets Wrong

DuckDuckGo does not run a full web index of its own, and its own documentation says so. The sources help page says the company maintains its own crawler, DuckDuckBot, and many indexes, and that for traditional links and images it largely sources from Bing.

That has one concrete consequence. If Bing has never crawled a page, DuckDuckGo cannot show it to you, whatever the ranking does. Popular queries hide this well, because every index has the popular pages. Long-tail queries expose it: an old forum thread, a small personal site, a technical document with almost no inbound links.

In the guides we publish here, the pattern we see readers get wrong most often is a switch made to escape one company's results. They land on a different front end serving those same results. A privacy policy changes what a company stores about you. The index decides what you can find at all.

Buying an index also means signing a contract for it. Contracts carry terms, and one of those terms reached into DuckDuckGo's privacy product in 2022.

The Microsoft Tracker Agreement

In May 2022 DuckDuckGo confirmed that its own browser let Microsoft tracking scripts load on third-party sites, because of its search syndication agreement with Microsoft. The finding was reported by BleepingComputer after a researcher tested the browser against Microsoft-owned LinkedIn and Bing advertising domains.

DuckDuckGo published its answer on 5 August 2022. It said the protection had been "limited" on Microsoft tracking scripts "due to a policy requirement related to our use of Bing". It added that it was "glad this is no longer the case". It also published its tracker protection list so people could check what was being blocked.

So the specific problem was fixed within three months, and it stayed fixed. The reason to care is the mechanism underneath it. Buying results from Microsoft meant accepting Microsoft's terms, and those terms reached into a privacy feature that DuckDuckGo sold as its main advantage. Any engine that resells another company's index carries the same exposure, including several of those below.

The AI Features DuckDuckGo Added

DuckDuckGo ships two AI features and one address that turns them off. Search Assist places AI-written answers above the links, and Duck.ai is a separate chat interface with access to third-party models, described on the company's AI chat help page.

The off switch is real, which puts DuckDuckGo ahead of most of the field on this one axis. Searching from noai.duckduckgo.com turns off Search Assist and Duck.ai and filters AI-generated images out of image results. DuckDuckGo says that address will remain a way to search without AI as it adds products. The Duck.ai buttons can also be hidden from search settings.

If your only objection is the AI summary at the top of a Google results page, changing engines is a heavy fix for a small problem. Our guide to turning off AI Overviews covers the Google-side settings and the web-filter URL instead.

DuckDuckGo vs Brave Search

Brave Search answers queries from an index Brave crawled itself. DuckDuckGo does not have one. In an announcement dated 27 April 2023, Brave wrote that "every Web search result seen in Brave Search is now served by our own index". The same post says Brave "removed all search API calls to Bing". Brave puts the same claim on its product page: results come from "its own, built-from-scratch index".

One nuance sits behind that claim, and Brave documents it. Google fallback mixing lets the Brave browser anonymously check Google for queries where Brave may not return enough results, with the two result sets mixed inside your browser. It is something you allow rather than something imposed, so leaving it switched off keeps the results fully Brave's.

Brave's AI is less avoidable than DuckDuckGo's. Brave's AI help page describes AI Answers, Ask Brave, featured snippets and AI-written result descriptions, all built on Brave's own models, and lists no setting for switching them off. Read AI summaries as part of the product rather than an option.

Both are free. Brave sells an ad-free tier, Brave Search Premium, whose price is not printed on that help page. The figure appears at Brave's checkout page.

Engines That Crawl the Web Themselves

Three engines besides Brave Search publish a claim to their own crawler, and each of them trades something for it. Independence costs money and machines, so a small index means fewer results per query.

• Mojeek crawls its own index and says it passed nine billion pages in 2025, after fifteen years of running search without tracking, per its about page. Searching is free. The trade is coverage: nine billion pages finds the open web and misses a lot of the commercial web you may be used to.
• Marginalia is a one-person index from Sweden that deliberately favours non-commercial sites and old pages, and is released under an open source licence. It describes itself as "simple technology, no AI". Free to use. It will not answer a shopping query, and it is not trying to.
• Qwant is a hybrid. On its own blog, in a post dated 18 September 2023, Qwant put its index at "20 billion indexed web pages". Its crawlers cover more than a billion pages a day. The same post says Qwant "uses Bing to supplement search results on which we do not have sufficient relevance, and on images". So part of what you see is crawled by Qwant and part is bought from Microsoft.

Qwant is also building a shared European index with Ecosia through a joint venture called European Search Perspective (EUSP), whose index is named Staan. Ecosia's launch post says the rollout began in France, with a target of 30% of French search queries by the end of 2025. A later post says EUSP results are now live in Germany.

Engines That Resell Other Results

Ecosia buys its results, and its own help centre names the suppliers. The search results providers article says results and related ads "come from our partners Microsoft Bing, Google and EUSP". Which one you get depends on your location, device and privacy permissions. Switching from DuckDuckGo to Ecosia therefore swaps a Bing front end for a Bing, Google and EUSP front end. The tree planting is a real reason to do it, but index independence is not.

SearXNG is a metasearch engine, which means it queries other engines and merges what comes back. Its documentation says it aggregates results from up to 271 search services and that users are neither tracked nor profiled, and it is open source and self-hostable. Running your own instance removes the company in the middle, so no operator logs your queries. The results themselves still come from Google, Bing and the rest.

The Paid Option

Kagi charges a subscription and shows no ads, which removes the incentive to rank pages by what they pay. Kagi's own search sources page says results come from its own web index, called Teclis, and its news index, called TinyGem. Kagi adds "anonymized API calls to all major search result providers worldwide" and specialised sources including Marginalia. So Kagi buys results too. The difference is that a subscription pays for them instead of ads.

Plans start at $5 a month and a trial of 100 searches is free, per Kagi's pricing page, checked on 2 September 2026. Which tier fits which kind of searcher is worked through in our Kagi review. Paying for search reverses a trade most people made without noticing: free results in exchange for an advertising auction deciding the order.

What Switching Engines Does Not Fix

Your search engine is not the only party that sees what you look for. Your internet service provider (ISP) sees the domains you connect to. Every site you open keeps its own logs, and those logs can be requested by law enforcement, including the FBI, through the site rather than through the engine.

The browser matters at least as much as the engine, because it is the thing loading trackers on every page you visit. Firefox and the Brave browser both block third-party trackers by default, and our guide to browsers without AI compares them on AI features. For the account and data side, our guide to protecting your privacy online covers the steps a search engine cannot take for you.

Our Pick and Who Should Skip It

Set Brave Search as your default and leave Google fallback mixing switched off. You get results from an index Microsoft and Google did not supply, at no cost, and the only thing you accept in exchange is AI summaries you cannot turn off. If AI summaries are the objection, use Mojeek instead and accept a smaller index.

Skip both if you search in a language other than English, search heavily for local businesses, or lean on image search. Small independent indexes are weakest exactly there, and Brave's own documentation admits it may not return enough results for some queries. That reader is better served by DuckDuckGo at noai.duckduckgo.com, or by Qwant, where Bing fills the gaps and the AI features are avoidable. The same goes for anyone whose real complaint is Google's AI Overviews rather than DuckDuckGo itself.

Three things would change our answer. If Brave made Google fallback mixing the default, its independence claim would stop meaning what it means today. If DuckDuckGo published its own full web index, the Bing dependency argument disappears. And if Brave shipped a documented off switch for AI Answers, the case for it gets stronger. The index question is the hardest of the three to solve.

Pick one of these duckduckgo alternatives and run your ten most recent searches through it, then keep whichever one finds the pages you were looking for.