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Comment by trpc | Hacker News Reader

>DDG Search is a free competitor to Google Search that doesn't track

prove it please

"We don't collect or share personal information. That's our privacy policy in a nutshell." https://duckduckgo.com/privacy

I can't prove that DDG doesn't track users, but their entire brand is based on very hardline privacy policy. If they are secretly tracking, and they are caught, their brand value will be reduced to near zero.

I doubt it. Firefox has had a few privacy scandals of their own, but as long as they are marginally better than Google, they'll keep having a fervent user base.

They record searches. They do not offer personalized ads that track users interest and sell ads.

Depending on what you are hiding. If you want to hide that anyone searched for a term, no. If you want to hide that you searched for a term, yes.

>They record searches

so they record the most important thing a search engine can get from users in order to make profit from ads, true respect for privacy indeed!

You ignored the rest of that post:

> If you want to hide that anyone searched for a term, no. If you want to hide that you searched for a term, yes.

This isn’t proof, but wouldn’t we hear some employee or partner leaks if it did? It’s hard to keep a really big secret while publicly proclaiming the opposite.

Exception would perhaps be a govt enforced one, with jail threats for those who leaked.

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