What you need to know
- DuckDuckGo has announced Route Planning.
- Users will now be able to get driving and walking directions through search.
- The company is partnering with Apple Maps to offer directions privately.
In a blog post, privacy-centric search engine DuckDuckGo has announced that it will now provide driving and walking directions with a partnership with Apple Maps. The company says that its new directions will, of course, be completely private.
We've been providing users with mapping features within DuckDuckGo Search for many years, along the way improving them with greater accuracy, dark mode, local re-querying and more. Now we're excited to announce a big step forward with the introduction of directions – private, as always, and like our embedded maps, powered by Apple's MapKit JS framework and already familiar to millions of users.
DuckDuckGo says that users will now, in addition to its usual offering of information when making a location and map search, see an addition of "route overview, distance and travel time."
You'll now see a new addition to location and map search results that will help you plan trips by showing you a route overview, distance and travel time. Look out for it both at the top of search results that display a map, as well as within our expanded map module.
The company is reassuring users that, even though the search engine will use your general location to create a starting point for directions, DuckDuckGo will gather this information completely anonymously.
As with all our search features, your privacy is still protected when using these directions thanks to our strict privacy policy of not collecting or sharing any personal information. In the case of location-related searches, your browser sends location information which we isolate from any personal information the browser sends, and which we discard after use, enabling us to provide anonymous localized results and features. Our help page has more detail on how we keep location searches private.
Driving and walking directions are available now to all DuckDuckGo users.
