This is great news for DuckDuckGo and I'm all for it, however, DuckDuckGo isn't completely private right? From what I see, DuckDuckGo obtains much of its data from 3rd parties, such as Bing/Microsoft and Yahoo. http://help.duckduckgo.com/customer/portal/articles/216399-s...
"While our indexes are getting bigger, we do not expect to be wholly independent from third-parties. Bing and Google each spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year crawling and indexing the deep Web. It costs so much that even big companies like Yahoo and Ask are giving up general crawling and indexing. Therefore, it seems silly to compete on crawling and, besides, we do not have the money to do so. Instead, we've focused on building a better search engine by concentrating on what we think are long-term value-adds -- having way more instant answers, way less spam, real privacy and a better overall search experience."
While we do use 3rd parties to fulfill some of our organic results we always make those calls from our machines. We never pass along IP addresses. This means that while our other sources might see your queries, they are not tied with PII (personally identifiable information).
I think you're not quite understanding how it works. They retrieve the data from e.g. Bing behind the scenes and the 3rd parties have no way to connect a query to an individual user.
That said, maybe there'd be an issue if you enter personally identifiable information as a query. But who does that?
"While our indexes are getting bigger, we do not expect to be wholly independent from third-parties. Bing and Google each spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year crawling and indexing the deep Web. It costs so much that even big companies like Yahoo and Ask are giving up general crawling and indexing. Therefore, it seems silly to compete on crawling and, besides, we do not have the money to do so. Instead, we've focused on building a better search engine by concentrating on what we think are long-term value-adds -- having way more instant answers, way less spam, real privacy and a better overall search experience."