There's something to be said for being in the right place at the right time, but they've done a great job of going above and beyond to embrace this moment. Great work.
I tried it, and the results aren't up to par with whatever I'm searching. They'll be forced to relinquish data like all the other companies when they get big enough.
I've noticed that people seem to think DDG is the only good privacy-conscious search engine out there. Lately I've been using StartPage[1], which simply passes through anonymized Google search results. So you don't have the same quality degradation as using DDG, and therefore never need to degrade your privacy for better results with !g.
The "world's most private search engine" pops up the following error message when searching:
"You may be using a privacy-oriented browser extension that conflicts with Startpage. Please disable this extension and try your search again. If this does not help, please contact us at (212) 447-1100 (USA) or autoquery @ ixquick.com."
What I am wondering is how can DDG show correct PPC results with out collecting user data. They must transfer searches to bing in order to display correct adverts.
I wish them well too, and talk about them to privacy-minded friends, but I dont use them personally because I almost always wind up going to Google anyway...
Edit: Its been some months, Ill give them another try.
I'm not sure I get the advantage of DDG's bang commands over using browser search keywords. I have one or two letter keywords for the few site specific searches I occasionally use (I find I use Google for almost everything, these others rarely, for very specific things). With bang commands I don't get to pick the mnemonic and it is often more than 2 letters. Also, for some people bang commands simply might not cover all of their specific searches (I just checked that they do for me, but, as I said, with much longer syntax than my browser keywords).
