On the one hand, I feel smugly better about using another browser[1]. But how could I feel this without google (i.e. google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic) to provide the ammunition? I'm so confused now.
It says they visited 6,815,255 Google sites and 1,686 contained malware. It only visited 152 DuckDuckGo pages. It would have to visit an order of magnitude more than 152 Google pages in order to expect one of them to contain malware.
As far as I know, DDG does just browser/search. By extension they shouldn't be able to do as much harm as a company that provides many more services (e.g., safebrowsing/diagnostic). [edited the following 2 sentences for readability.] For example, one area possible threat could be code.google.com. DDG doesn't have a counterpart of hosted code, so it can't possibly be a threat.
Hence, my confusion. Yes, part of me was just trying to be humorously sarcastic. But part of me really enjoys some of the innovative ways that Google leverages data. And yet, another part of my thinks that they have stepped over important privacy and security lines in other areas. Hence, I prefer DDG for the vast majority of my search needs.
[1] http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=duckduckg...