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Just use a special landing page like http://yoursite.com/duckduckgo and you just redirect and get your own stats by seing who came to your site from this landing page...

I should have thought of this earlier. If you send it through a redirect url (or even better a special DDG landing page), it is certainly traceable.

I believe DDG doesn't set a referrer for privacy reasons.

I think the technical reason is that DDG defaults to search over HTTPS (for privacy reasons), and most browsers won't set the referer HTTP header when moving from HTTPS to HTTP.

I don't get. We don't they use an special query string to identify the origin? Like the utm_ from Analytics.

Surely if users are tracked then this is no longer a privacy respecting search engine.