Yeah, but you do you realize that DDG is Bing. And while DDG does not track you, Bing does. So essentially the reason why DDG kinda works well is because a lot of user are still being tracked by Bing.
>DuckDuckGo earns revenue by serving ads from the Yahoo-Bing search alliance network and through affiliate relationships with Amazon and eBay.
>In July 2016, DuckDuckGo officially announced the extension of its partnership with Yahoo! that brought new features to all users of the search engine, including date filtering of results and additional site links. It also partners with Bing, Yandex, and Wikipedia to produce results or make use of features offered. The company also confirmed that it does not share user information with partner companies, as has always been its policy.
As far as I know (hence I could be wrong), that’s outdated. Since Yahoo was purchased by Verizon, it is predominately Bing results with some Yahoo/Oath/Verizon Media results sprinkled in, considering it now predominantly uses Bing itself. Yandex is no longer used and Wikipedia is just part of their knowledge cards or whatever they call them, like StackOverflow is. In other words, it’s mainly Bing with DDG’s own crawler used specifically for the knowledge cards and to modify the priority of results pulled from Bing.
With that said, I do believe they have a special deal with Microsoft to not pass along any information. Instead, the only information Microsoft sees is DDG requesting the results on behalf of the users (aka Bing/MS just sees DDG’s IP, etc. which can be seen sometimes in the results, not the knowledge card, when you search for “what’s my IP” in DDG). My one gripe though is that they’re definitely not as transparent as they could be about where and how they source results.
DDG claims to aggregate Bing, Yahoo, and Yandex, but Yahoo switched to Bing a decade ago, and Yandex is only really relevant for Russian-localized websites.
I could be wrong, but my understanding is that when DDG sends a search request to Bing, it doesn't include the ip address of the user making the search request. The fact that I have read many articles and hn discussions of DDG, and none of them claimed that it does send the ip addresses on to Bing makes me think I am right.
This is one reason I've been trying out qwant lately over ddg. From what I can gather they generate results from their own crawler rather than relying on Bing.
Unfortunately getting concrete information about this is oddly difficult. Anecdotally just from comparing a couple of sample searches ddg seems to be based on Bing, but not exactly, and their own faq claims they use other sources too.
Eh? Maybe you are saying that because they serve ads from Bing?
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuckDuckGo :
>DuckDuckGo earns revenue by serving ads from the Yahoo-Bing search alliance network and through affiliate relationships with Amazon and eBay.
>In July 2016, DuckDuckGo officially announced the extension of its partnership with Yahoo! that brought new features to all users of the search engine, including date filtering of results and additional site links. It also partners with Bing, Yandex, and Wikipedia to produce results or make use of features offered. The company also confirmed that it does not share user information with partner companies, as has always been its policy.