February 9 2026
Several months ago I blogged about switching from Google to DuckDuckGo for search. I mentioned some (but not all) of my reasons for switching: Google Search “dropped support for the n= URL parameter that allowed you to specify the number of results shown per page” and kept “incorrectly flagging me as a bot.” These Google Search problems are exacerbated by my preference for performing searches in private browsing mode, not logged in to any account. Google practically forced me to switch by making my preferred workflow unusable. Unfortunately, despite the degradation of Google Search results over the years, which countless people have observed and lamented, Google still provides superior results, at least for my purposes, to other search providers I’ve tried.
The other day I was investigating a Firefox issue with native messaging in my browser extension StopTheMadness Pro, and I searched for "~/Library/Application Support/Mozilla" (the path of a folder on macOS) with DuckDuckGo:
DuckDuckGo search results offered only two links from the entire web!
According to a DuckDuckGo help document:
Most of our search result pages feature one or more Instant Answers. To deliver Instant Answers on specific topics, DuckDuckGo leverages many sources, including specialized sources like Sportradar and crowd-sourced sites like Wikipedia. We also maintain our own crawler (DuckDuckBot) and many indexes to support our results. Of course, we have more traditional links and images in our search results too, which we largely source from Bing.
Indeed, years ago when I contemplated purchasing some search ads on DuckDuckGo, I discovered that DuckDuckGo did not have its own advertising sales but rather relied on Microsoft Advertising, which sells ads for Bing.
Below is the same search as before, this time with Microsoft Bing:
Bing returns multiple pages of search results from the web, as I would expect. Why is there such a difference between Bing and DuckDuckGo when DuckDuckGo admittedly sources from Bing?!?
It’s disappointing that I can’t rely on DuckDuckGo for decent search results. For now, I’m going to experiment with Bing as my default search engine, much as I hate Microsoft. (Google is a still dead to me.)
Addendum
I’m getting some Cloudflare challenges from Bing when searching from the address bar of a Safari private window. Oddly, I haven't seen any Cloudflare challenges from an Alfred custom search https://www.bing.com/search?rdr=0&safe_search=off&q={query} workflow, which is my preferred method for initiating a search, so I’m not sure yet whether this is a Bing deal-breaker.
By the way, for the Kagi fanatics in the audience, I have indeed tried Kagi, so you don’t need to ask me whether I’ve tried Kagi. Moreover, it should go without saying but apparently does not go without saying that “my preference for performing searches in private browsing mode, not logged in to any account” rules out Kagi, so I’m saying it now.