They claim to not store IP addresses (but they do process it in some way) or user agents. They rely on their own web crawling for all search results. Considering that the feature is opt-in, and again assuming that their engine builds on this usage data, I am surprised at how good search results their engine provides me with.Īnother up-and-coming search provider I deem interesting is yep.com. I have not found clear information on how this crawling is conducted, but it seems that they use usage data from Brave Browser users. They state that a large majority of search results result from their own crawling, from something they call the Web Discovery Project. But I am interested in knowing more about their independent web crawling methods. I assume (but can’t confirm) that DuckDuckGo works the same way.Īs for Brave Search, I don’t want to judge it straight away as it’s still a rather new search engine. They also transmit search queries to their “partners” (including Bing), presumably to be able to extract and display the search results. They will also read your user agent, but it’s not clear whether this gets linked to your IP address. Metager notes in their privacy policy that IP addresses and timestamps of searches are stored for 96 hours, then presumably deleted. So any personal information entered into that search box is saved.Īs to tracking your ad clicks, I cannot remember the last time I saw an ad on DuckDuckGo, so I cannot myself evaluate how they look and behave. Note that DuckDuckGo does store search queries. But even if they do, Tor Browser should protect you against this (what can be extracted is the IP address of the exit node and the generic user agent shared by thousands of other Tor Browser users). According to their privacy policy ( DuckDuckGo Privacy) they don’t store your IP or browser user agent. Not full of trackers and things that can be used to fingerprint a browsing session.ĭuckDuckGo is not full of trackers, but they use their own in-house analytics.

Brave search engine