I use Bing with cookies and JS disabled. DDG on the other hand can't be used with JS disabled.
Before you say that privacy is about cookies and JS has no bearing in it, think that Google for example uses all kinds of JS to gather information about your browser. That's extra datapoints that they gather about you.
With regards to the search component, we actually offer two Non-JS sites: https://duckduckgo.com/html & https://duckduckgo.com/lite. Also, turning off JS and cookies still doens't prevent a search engine from tracking you, which they can do simply by your IP address.
That's quite cool, thank you. For some reason it I can't make it work with Firefox's "search keyword" (the feature of starting a query with a keyword on the smart-bar which forwards that query to the search engine of your choice)
> Also, turning off JS and cookies still doens't prevent a search engine from tracking you, which they can do simply by your IP address.
Sure. Some datapoints about you are easier to hide than others. So are you saying that DDG doesn't store that?
>When you search at DuckDuckGo, we don't know who you are and there is no way to tie your searches together.
> When you access DuckDuckGo (or any Web site), your Web browser automatically sends information about your computer, e.g. your User agent and IP address.
> Because this information could be used to link you to your searches, we do not log (store) it at all. This is a very unusual practice, but we feel it is an important step to protect your privacy.
They also provide tools to help prevent other sites from tracking you:
>Finally, if you want to prevent sites from knowing you visited them at all, you can use a proxy like Tor. DuckDuckGo actually operates a Tor exit enclave, which means you can get end to end anonymous and encrypted searching using Tor & DDG together.
>You can enter !proxy domain into DuckDuckGo as well, and we will route you through a proxy, e.g. !proxy breadpig.com. This feature is part of our !bang syntax. Unfortunately, proxies can also be slow, and free proxies (like the one we use) are funded by arguably excessive advertising.
On privacy, yes, -- that's our privacy policy in a nutshell: we do not collect or share any personal information -- https://duckduckgo.com/privacy
In any case, I'm still waiting to understand why this is better than using any other search engine with cookies and JS turned off.
I'm trying to get this working on Firefox right now. Doesn't work for some reason. I'm trying to associate keyword "d" with duckduckgo.com/html, but instead I just land on duckduckgo.com/html itself.
However when I access it on Firefox + umatrix with all js disabled, it doesn't.
I suspect I know what it is. Possibly noscript sends some header saying that the browser doesn't have JS which causes ddg to respond with the redirect, whereas umatrix just breaks the whole thing entirely.
EDIT: I just tried going to about:config and setting javascript.enabled to false, and indeed now I get redirected. This has significantly improved my view of ddg.
Be sure you have the setting "Spoof <noscript> tags" enabled if you want noscript tags to be rendered when 1st-party scripts are blocked. It's a per-site setting, but you can enable it globally in the "Settings" pane in the dashboard.
Thank you so much for umatrix! It really has changed the way I use the internet.