[pi-squared]

I'm happy to switch to DDG from Evil Google, but what stops them from becoming as "evil" as Google at some point? It's a for-profit organization relying on ads and sure - its selling point now is privacy but other than the word of the author, what else is there that at some point when it grows enough it won't start to slowly break that promise? Why is it not open source/federated? Why has it stopped the DuckDuckHack project (which was the bit that was open source)? This is probably the one search engine that has been able to gain a lot of privacy-centered/hacky individuals mostly (I think, may be wrong) through marketing/PR. If the causes are really that privacy centered, why not restructure it as non-profit + open source + decentralized? Not saying it's easy, but the marketing part (which I consider equally or even more difficult - see Bing with all MS budget and efforts), has already gathered a lot of interest for such a project.

[brentadamson]

I'm with you! I've been developing https://jivesearch.com/, which is basically an open source version of DDG. Has all the !bangs and tons of instant answers. The best part is that if you are paranoid about privacy or don't trust me for some reason you can leave me out of the equation and run it yourself. Would love your feedback on it.