Duck Duck Go Searches Are Now Externally Anonymous

Thank you, Gabriel.<p>The way you listen to your users and implement fixes and suggestions quickly is probably almost as important to your success as good search results right now, at least to me. Makes me want to use your site more.

I'll copy here what I wrote on GW's blog:<p>Thank you for taking the privacy of your users seriously! Most of us aren't spies or Chinese dissidents, but the <i>principle</i> of privacy is very important to me, and I'm glad to see that it is to you too.

I love the fast fixes and changes you're giving. As much as I like Google I just can't see them reacting this fast.

FYI, <a href="https://ddgw.s3.amazonaws.com/external.png" rel="nofollow">https://ddgw.s3.amazonaws.com/external.png</a> is still being loaded direct by s212.css, rather than being proxied via your server. The search term isn't included in the referer though.

People here are probably not going to like this but I will not trust Duck Duck Go until they release their whole source code and allow me to run my own instance. For now, there's still a middle man called Duck Duck Go that I have to blindly trust. I salute his efforts to make his page privacy friendly, but as long as there is a middle man and no one to check his source code to check if he's not sending anything about us, there can't possibly and technically be any guaranteed privacy. Any one who has taken basic cryptography course would agree with that.

What is the big deal with sending the referrer header? It's been common practice for many years. Why the upheaval now? And shouldn't this type of thing be a browser setting instead of a website hack?

Is there a way to add Duck Duck Go to the firefox search bar? I really like using keywords to launch searches (since I use VIMperator) but I can't seem to add arbitrary keywords to my knowledge.

Excellent work. Thank you for taking this problem seriously.

Hey Gabriel,<p>Fantastic work, a case study in dealing with problems in a product.<p>If there was a prize for stuff like this you ought to get it :)

Clicking on a search result now redirects through the DDG server.<p>So, Gabriel, if you woke up tomorrow as your Evil twin, you could do click tracking with no further user-visible change of behavior.<p>Google used to do stealth click tracking via javascript. I have not kept up with whether they still do, but it was that kind of thing that influenced me to switch to DDG.

The site now(?) uses some redirection instead of sending me directly to the URL I click on. This screws up copy'n'pasting. I really do not like this.<p>I found kd=-1 on the params page but that parameter is gone as soon as I enter a new search term.

What's wrong with <a href="https://www.google.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.google.com</a>

I did a search and I was served a domain parking Ad as a landing page. WTF am I missing? This search engine looks like a spam to me.and I wouldn't have cared if it hadn't shown up at HN.