Nothing collect or share your information as long as no whistleblower makes it public.
How do you only capture ips for automated queries? Do you mean you're really logging all ips then scrubbing them after a certain amount time?
Not sure how they do it but in part we look for bogus search patterns across a wide variety of IPs. If 1,500 IP's search for (with quotes) "Enter your password or click the button to post anonymously" I'm gonna guess it is some SEO type who has a scripted search looking for forums where they can post link spam. There are a variety of things that in aggregate pop out as not being humans searching for things.
I'm just saying though, you have to record the ip in order to provide that functionality, especially for searches over time. So are they recording the ips then dumping them after x amount of time? That's different than what they claim.
Possibly.
Can someone who has used this search engine compare it with DuckDuckGo?
I've been trying out both for the last couple of days. So far I would say that DuckDuckGo seems to have slightly better results but ixquick has the added bonus of not being american.