The only sensible comment in the entire thread! There is no reason whatsoever to trust DDG more than Google. In fact you'd think it far more likely that DDG is a stooge of the NSA than is Google.

I do personally find this thread quite amusing because it's so irrational. Firefox + DDG is so slow for searching that you might as well erase 10 years of browser performance improvements and downgrade your DSL line. Chrome omnibar + prefetch + google instant makes for much faster searching vs. firefox which lacks all of those things (and DDG which lacks "instant"). Also I have to type the entire search into firefox's search bar because DDG doesn't have suggestions. And let's not even talk about the gulf in quality between DDG and Google.

Because at the very least it doesn't use tracking cookies, which we know Google does. Whether it tracks based on IP and/or browser fingerprint is impossible to tell - there we have to take their word for it.