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Please refer to this link. I don't see what the big deal is though - I use DuckDuckGo because they don't share my information with their partners. I could care less if they aggregrate their search results from many different sources.

https://duck.co/help/results/sources You can get google results by adding !g to your search (or !sp if you want to get google results through startpage.com).

Don't trust Google to do this for you, rather do it yourself using these simple instructions which have always been available.

Better yet, don't use Chrome, and instead use Chromium if your that concerned about lessening Google's control over your browsing.

DuckDuckGo's sources include Yahoo(now Oath) and Bing. ( https://duck.co/help/results/s... ).

And Yahoo gets their results from google. ( https://searchengineland.com/y... )

And Bing gets results from google ( https://www.wired.com/2011/02/... )

Jeez, give it a break. First, it ain't like 'rolling their own' mapping application is as easy ordering chinese takeout. And despite Apple's spectacularly-better scores from security analysts on hardware encryption and privacy-impacted data collected, you declare (without evidence) that a partnership with Apple is proof of DDG engaging in a much larger sellout. That's some serious bullshitery (quotes and links below).

DDG mapping appears to give requested features, with an improved security default to rely upon (DDG + Apple maps put through DDG's ability to filter and consolidate in ways that degrade tracking and provide moderate anonymization). The enemy of Good Enough, in this case, is a false choice of Perfect or Nothing.

DDG sayeth: "Naturally, our strict privacy policy of not collecting or sharing any personal information extends to this integration. We do not send any personally identifiable information such as IP address to Apple or other third parties. For local searches, where your approximate location information is sent by your browser to us, we discard it immediately after use. You are still anonymous when you perform map and address-related searches on DuckDuckGo. You can read more about our anonymous localized results here."

The only element where DDG seems unduly optimistic is in that linked paper on anonymized-localized results, toward the bottom. They say doing what they do makes your activity 'completely anonymous'. Web bugs, clientside code, partnership-maintained tracking and/or any continuum of user activity breaches that veil. But search requests through DDG *breaks* what they can of that continuum by degrees, since they don't tokenize, save and track themselves, and they don't relay request data that helps that. So, someone might track my activity via their own trickery or partnership-maintained-tracking in the pages I visit, but the misdeeds of other websites aren't DDG's direct fault.

Proof?

DuckDuckGo have their own crawler, and like any other search engine or AI personal assistant, sometimes they use third-parties for instant answers, such as Wikipedia, Wolfram Alpha, Stack Overflow, MetroLyrics, etc, etc - basically "over 400 sources".

I don't think I've used Google in over 10 years now - I first switched to Bing, then about 6 years ago, to DuckDuckGo. And except on a handful of occasions (for image search), I've never used Bing, and certainly not Google!

In my opinion, DuckDuckGo has surpassed Google by far, as they don't mess with your query, they don't bubble you in your own little world, and you can use advanced queries to target what you really need.

Presumably DDG pays Google for the use of their search API anyway.

No, they actually don't.

DDG's business model is to sell ads on its platform, so you have to trust that they won't use those to spy on you or infect your machine with malware. Unfortunately they seem to be using the Bing and Amazon ad networks.

They use bing, and curate the ads served. Something fundamentally different, remember when companies had their own ad hosts and only allowed specific ads? Yeah...those were the days before giant ad networks spewing malware. Oh, the other way is via affiliate links aka you click on a product they get a cut. They also don't follow you around the internet like a crazy ex that just can't seem to let go.

Presumably DDG pays Google for the use of their search API anyway.

No, they actually don't.

DDG's business model is to sell ads on its platform, so you have to trust that they won't use those to spy on you or infect your machine with malware. Unfortunately they seem to be using the Bing and Amazon ad networks.

They use bing, and curate the ads served. Something fundamentally different, remember when companies had their own ad hosts and only allowed specific ads? Yeah...those were the days before giant ad networks spewing malware. Oh, the other way is via affiliate links aka you click on a product they get a cut. They also don't follow you around the internet like a crazy ex that just can't seem to let go.

Please take 1 minute and give them feedback! Just copypaste your post, and add a link to the forums they suck at finding. You may make the world a better place.

Love DDG. The only thing that keeps me having to switch back to Google is the lack of a "last year" option (or custom date range) when refining search results. According to the bottom of this page they are working on it, although this feature has been pending for a very long time.

I'm not sure what https://duck.co/ is, but I am quite sure it's not the same as https://duckduckgo.com/

When I try to look up the weather for San José I get information for Carmen, Provincia San José. Ok, so I try "weather San Jose, CA", it still finds the city in Costa Rica. So I try using a zip code, "weather 95126". Nope, still Costa Rica. The folks at DuckDuckHack make some painful to watch bugs.

DuckDuckGo isn't based solely on bing, they use hundreds of sources, including their own bot, and sometimes Yahoo, Bing, and Yandex.

Oh, and they also fight for your rights.

"Both yahoo and duckduckgo use bing for search. So the options are only 2 - google and bing"

Untrue:https://duck.co/help/results/sources

https://duck.co/ia/view/indeed_jobs

If you're not deliberately choosing to remain ignorant so that you can make accusations, you can easily find out DuckDuckGo's business model. I searched for "DuckDuckGo business model". You could have done the same in the time it took to write your post, if you weren't more interested in smearing them and exonerating Google.

They've posted the details about how they make money, which basically boil down to two things:
1) They show clearly-identified ads (unless you disable ads in your settings) at the top of some search results. The only information they send is your search term, that way they can get relevant ads. They never send anything identifying or that would allow Bing/Yahoo (the source of the ads) to target you specifically.

2) They modify eBay and Amazon links to make them affiliate links, just like you'd see on review sites or pretty much anywhere else. I.e. The URL is modified to indicate that you're coming from DDG, so they get a commission if you end up buying anything.

For them, that's enough to keep the lights on, though I doubt they're bringing money in hand-over-fist, since the majority of their current users are likely savvy ones who've disabled or blocked the ads, I'd imagine. They're probably hopeful that they can attract a more mainstream crowd with time, since those users are more likely to see ads.

No, they're selling your attention without selling your information. As they make abundantly clear in their privacy policy (that's written in refreshingly plain English by the site's founder himself, no less), they modify links to some product pages to make them into affiliate links (i.e. they get a kickback for referring you to product pages at Amazon and eBay).

Their Information Shared section is a quick read. After they explain that they don't share any info, but that you might inadvertently leak search terms to the sites you click on if you purposefully disable protections DDG enables by default, they then have this great snippet that demonstrates the sort of mindset they follow:

Also, like anyone else, we will comply with court ordered legal requests. However, in our case, we don't expect any because there is nothing useful to give them since we don't collect any personal information.

Moreover, you can disable advertising for DuckDuckGo if you want (it's a setting you can toggle). Oh, and all of those settings I'm talking about? They only ever exist client-side and aren't linked to an account or identity in any way. You either pass them in as a set or URL parameters or as a cookie that contains no identifiable information. In fact, in a quick check of the site via uMatrix (with ads disabled), it shows that 100% of the resources served are first-party, so there isn't a single external Javascript or tracking cookie being set by sleazy advertisers or people outside their control.

If you're still concerned, here are the details about how they make money, which make it abundantly clear (again, in plain English) how they make money without selling their users' information.

Honestly, if you want to complain about DDG, the biggest issue remains the quality of their results. They finally got "good enough" for me, so I switched to them about a year ago and haven't regretted it, and they've only been getting better since then (e.g. they'll oftentimes have the top-rated StackOverflow answer displayed as a pull-out at the top of the search results), but there's still room for improvement (e.g. longer search terms produce noisy results for me). That said, the fact that they offer bangs makes it drop-dead simple to deal with those situations (i.e. add "!g" to your search to Google it instead). Plus, the fact that I can set them as my default search engine in Chrome/iOS/etc. means that no matter where I am, I can just use the bangs for Amazon (!a), Wikipedia (!w), Google Maps (!gm), Rotten Tomatoes (!rt), or whatever else to immediately jump to the results at those sites, rather than having to first navigate to them.

It's a great site that's continually getting better, and I would strongly encourage others to give it a shot or try it again if it's been awhile since the last time they tried it.

That's pathetic compared to the DuckDuckGo bang syntax.

Normal search query (search in DuckDuckGo): "streets of london"
Redirect search to Google: "!g streets of london"
Redirect search to Bing: "!b streets of london"
Redirect search to Wikipedia: "!w streets of london"
Redirect search to google maps: "!maps streets of london"
etc, etc, etc.

See here: https://duck.co/help/results/s... and here https://duckduckgo.com/bang.

DuckDuckGo's results often aren't the best, but they make it up by having a damn nice interface. Google's search syntax is just embarrassing in comparison.

Because duckduckgo don't bubble you and track you.
They are also popular because you can hack the code.

I haven't used google for over 5 years, and I particularly love ddg's instant answers and the fact they utilise OpenStreetMap and Wolfram Alpha, Wikipedia, etc.

Since it wasn't in the article, here's a list of recipients.

• Freedom of the Press Foundation for SecureDrop
• Freenet Project
• OpenBSD Foundation
• CrypTech Project
• Tor Project for onion services
• Fight for the Future for Save Security
• Open Source Technology Improvement Fund for VeraCrypt
• Riseup Labs for LEAP
• GPGTools for GPGMail

No, duckduckgo isn't Bing, they have their own algorithm and bots, and also use the Russian Yandex search engine.

I'm a developer, and I haven't used Google for at least 6 years.
I switched to Bing for about 2 years, and then to duckduckgo.

I love duckduckgo's open source community platform and that anyone can code for it, especially "instant answers".

just prefix the search with !g for google, https://duck.co/help/features/...

• Protects your privacy and doesn’t track you.. donttrack.us
• Gives back to free and open source software. http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/11/help-me-start-a-foss-tithing-movement.html
• Is partially open source... https://github.com/duckduckgo
• Gives really awesome results... https://duck.co/topic/wow-queries-that-showcase-ddg