Do you have a search engine that you prefer to use that claims not to store said information that I might try?
Every centralized search engine has immensely hard-to-resist and powerful incentives to play "The Eye of Sauron" with your data. Additionally, they offer single points of compromise to other, far more powerful actors. Whatever guarantees DuckDuckGo gives you -and right now they don't give any- don't mean much, if they've been thoroughly (willingly or unwillingly) compromised.
Which doesn't mean one should always steer well clear just that one should at least be aware of the tradeoffs one makes when using a centralized search engine. And with DuckDuckGo's misleading marketing, I feel that this point is lost on significant chunks of its userbase.
It wouldn't matter anyway, because decentralization doesn't really solve privacy any better than centralized search, besides the fact that it could theoretically provide more choices.
No matter what you use, privacy ultimately depends on trust. The reason that I have more trust for DDG than I do Google is, unlike Google, its primary audience is privacy-minded folks. If it came out that DDG was tracking users and selling that data, DDG would be immediately done as a brand. They at least have some incentive to do what they say. Decentralization provides no such benefit because a search "node" is unlikely to have any sort of meaningful brand to keep up.
> And with DuckDuckGo's misleading marketing, I feel that this point is lost on significant chunks of its userbase.
How is it misleading? My understanding from their marketing is that they don't create profiles of their users based on searches. Until we have evidence to the contrary, it's not outrageous to assume they are being truthful.
In your Privacy page (Data Usage Section) there is a mention of stored "Browser Data" & " These logs contain the time of visit, page requested, possibly referral data, and located in a separate log browser information." & "We may also use aggregate, non-personal search data to improve our results".
This is an honest question - How is that not exactly what the Parent stated was the issue?
So they save your web searches and claim that they do so in an non-personally identifiable way.But agreed that all search engines have to be trusted on their word about anonymising data and not retaining PII when it comes to searches specifically. There's nothing any front end user can do to verify it.