[lubujackson]

Reading all these comments made me wonder... If DDG uses the Bing API and is passing the search term to whatever search-related text ads they show, that's a pretty big blind spot for the privacy advocates. Because Bing still gets your search term and so does the ad network. What they don't get is your IP address, but as the AOL search dump proved, sometimes search terms alone are enough to identify someone. It's still a nice feature, but I wouldn't consider it a solved issue.

[elehack]

Bing gets everyone's search terms merged together, with no way to distinguish individual users. To Bing, it looks like one user doing a bajillion searches on all manner of topics.

In the AOL case, while IP addresses were stripped, users were identified with unique keys so you could see individual users' search sequences. That is not the case here.