The DDG CEO has set out his point of view here: https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/uxiah9/duckduckgo_caught_giving_microsoft_permission_for/i9xxjsn/?context=3
Personally, there is no change for me - I did not intend using the DDG browser, and I will continue using the DDG search engine… for now.
Definitely worth a look.
Here’s an instance that’s kept working very well for some time:
I am giving it a try as the default in firefox. So far it displays results well.
@keybreak @HMS_Endeavour For Brave Search preview release, I was selected by their team for its initial testings, when this was launched and was open for very few people, back in the time when I
was on Windows and was using Brave Browser.
.
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But I am not that much satisfied with its results for me. The results are not much accurate, and whenever I was in need to search for my study related concepts, then I was not provided with detailed informations.
On other side, whenever I typed “India” and press enter, then the news displayed were somewhat anti-national, and they were portraying bad image of my country. This reason was enough for me to avoid this search engine.
I am not in India but just searched “India” and just got Wikipedia, country info, World Bank, National Geographic, type of results.
For now í will compare the results, which looks to be well formatted.
Head to new section…
Once a duck …always a duck. 
Don’t forget that Searx and Whoogle exist.
our friends at garuda host a searx instance: https://searx.garudalinux.org/?q=endeavouros+ftw
It is also fairly easy to host your own search instance.
IF you have an actual server yes. But don’t even THINK about hosting an instance on a 386.
In general I would not be running much of anything on a 386 these days. I run searx on a 10 year old intel e3-1241v3 as one of many VM’s. It is not very resource intensive as long as you run it as a private instance.
True. But don’t even THINK about running a public searx like searx.garudalinux.org instance on THAT hardware. Or mine.
I wouldn’t be able to have that in my sweetest dreams…
You run it locally? Is there any point to that from a privacy perspective? Don’t all the queries point back to you anyway since the searx instance is local?
https://searx.github.io/searx/user/own-instance.html
Essentially all private data is stripped out, I also get to pick the combination of search engines I want to use. The only thing they are really getting is my public ip address, which realistically they already have, unless I have jumped through hoops to set up an elite proxy running on the TOR network and even that is not foolproof.
Agreed!
I am sick of all this hunting around for the ultimate search engine.
Once a Duck… works for me.
Same goes for browsers! Firefox! Works for me and you can have a duck too!
I guess it depends what you are trying to protect and from whom.
In my case, google probably has already associated my ip address with me. My goal is to ensure that they can’t use that information to tie my searches to me. If I setup a local searx instance, they still know those searches come from me since they are still coming from my IP address.
I don’t need to use a vpn or tor to work around that. I can get my search requests from somewhere else instead. Some place I trust more than google. Since the bar is set pretty low by “someone I trust more than google”, almost anything would be better. aka presearch, a random searx instance, etc, etc.
Yes, those create a different set of privacy issues but for my needs, those aren’t as concerning as google enriching their profile on me with my entire search history.