Here's the technical implementation:
https://duck.co/help/results/yahoo-technical-implementation
- To get access to the most relevant Yahoo technology, due to contractual obligations that call has to be associated with a Yahoo domain, in this case, duckduckgo-owned-server.yahoo.net. To make sure this call does not violate our privacy policy, Yahoo delegates this domain to us via DNS. In other words, duckduckgo-owned-server.yahoo.net is operated by DuckDuckGo and runs solely on our servers. Yahoo does not have access to these servers in any respect.
I use DuckDuckGo almost exclusively since I've set it as my default. It doesn't search for current news events that happened within the last few hours or days, so I have to google for that, but that isn't super often for me. In some ways, I like that the searches aren't so specific to me because that means that they aren't following me around. I've noticed the attempts at ads that I had to circumvent, but I've stuck with it. I was slightly alarmed when I saw this title, but the text looks like there's hope that not much is changing.
I use it exclusively, too, and most people who say Google has better results make no sense to me. I use Stock Android through ROMs and YouTube without an account, but that's about it from Google. Most of my searches are for code, errors, and bug trackers, so I guess I don't really know what it is that Google's usage really does for you. I'm kind of detached from pop culture and if I want to see the latest news stories I'll check my RSS feeds. Most of my searching is actually done on Wikipedia, not a search engine. I think I switched over before the machine learning kicked in full effect on Google so I got lucky and never got pumped full of the heroin juices. It's not really an anti-Google thing either. I've just in general decided to move all my services across as many places as possible to protect data in general. Everyone has breaches now, one of these days Google will too. They may be really good at security, but you can't be perfect ever and they are a huge target. The catalyst for the switch for search was for a different search engine I can't remember that got hacked and about 2 months of data got public. Some smaller portions of the data set became very publicly search-able to show what was in it and it was scary. Everyone could see IP addresses of people with names (in the real datasets that were leaked, not the public facing search-able ones which were anonymized for publication) and just a stream of their searches and it was terrifying to read through some of them. It's amazing what people's searches can tell you about a person. I personally just don't trust any company to do security right anymore after having seen so many of them from the inside. Everything everywhere is just a house of cards and a large majority of coders and DBAs are doing the stupidest things out there and saying it's the new "security department's" role to deal with it, while the security departments are freaking out wholesale over the stupid shit people do, even and sometimes especially the smart ones since they overlook things they assume they do correctly every time. True story: A major organization, a high quality tech with sudo access, `sudo chmod -R 777 /`. WHATCHADOIN'? Ooops, uhh just undo that. Not how UNIX works, man. Scares me to think what else he did before restoring from backups.
I started using ddg but was quickly hated using it because of how much of a convenience google offers in terms of services. they got it locked down im afriad :/
I found myself using the `!g` shortcut often enough after I switched that it didn't feel like I was getting enough of the privacy benefits to bother sticking with DDG. As concerned as I am of Google's knowledge of me, I have to admit that they're good at showing me what I want to see.
This partnership is not an acquisition. It's a responsible restricted contract for gaining the ability to use their technology while maintaining full control of the data. DuckDuckGo simply now have a few servers that are technically owned by Yahoo for this purpose for legal reasons, but are in full control by DDG.