I was confused what you meant by DDG properly proxying stuff. When arguing for DDG, people often say that you can still use !g to get google results (for example) and that sounds great, but when you try it, it doesn't proxy at all, you are literally redirected to Google and it doesn't add anything. But I think you're talking about which index it is that DDG queries internally to yield regular (non-bang) search results?

When you search on DDG, it sends it to bing via their servers. Bing doesnt know you are searching, it can only see duckduckgo and the search term, not you.

DDG gets results back from bing, sometimes modifying it with it's own results to make them better.

> But I think you're talking about which index it is that DDG queries internally to yield regular (non-bang) search results?

Yes. Most of it is Bing.

Ecosia doesn't proxy it properly. It sends it to bing from you browser, not from Ecosia's servers. Bing knows your IP and sets cookies to track you. You can observe it with dev tools.

They might have changed it since I last checked.

>"...it doesn't proxy at all, you are literally redirected to Google and it doesn't add anything. "

If you are looking for proxied Google results, your main options are Runnaroo [0] and Startpage [1].

I'm the creator of Runnaroo, and I prefer it to Startpage (and also DDG, but that is another thread).

[0] https://www.runnaroo.com/

[1] https://www.startpage.com/

Please don't recommend Startpage in a privacy thread. They are owned by adtech company System1.

Yeah, I think they were talking about the index, and I'm not sure that's true any more. I don't remember the sources, but I remember reading that DDG started relying more on their own indexing and less on Bing about a year ago. And from some testing I did some time ago, it was the case that only 50-60% of the search results on DDG were similar to Bing - meaning it's still a significant source, but not so much as to say DDG is just proxying requests.

> DDG does a proper proxy.

How do you know? I mean they’re closed source and you have no idea what data they send to Microsoft’s Bing and Advertising APIs.

DDG does a proper proxy from my side. Bing is not loaded when I load duckduckgo.com, unlike ecosia which loads bing.net and bing.com subdomains right in my browser.

No but Google is if you use !g on DDG. HN users seem to love that feature.

Google is not loaded on ddg. Google is loaded on google.com when you use !g.