The emergent search engine, DuckDuckGo, has announced that it’s introducing privacy-respecting driving and walking directions to its map search results. To open up directions, just search a location you want to go to in search and press the new ‘Directions’ button if a map appears in the search results, or navigate to the maps tab and press ‘Directions’ on the sidebar.
After pressing the directions option you’ll be presented with a new sidebar that lets you select your mode of travel, the start of your route, and the destination. Once you’ve provided it with these bits of information, it will offer up different routes with the travel duration and the route distance. You can expand these route options by pressing ‘Show steps’, this will bring up detailed instructions on how to complete the journey.
Privacy is at the core of DuckDuckGo and its maps offering is no different. In its announcement, DuckDuckGo said:
“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.”
The new map directions are fairly basic compared to other mapping tools but hopefully, this can be expanded in the future to incorporate public transport timetables and cycling routes. Nevertheless, directions should come in handy for DuckDuckGo users that want to get a rough estimate of how long their trips may take.