The only solution I see is fully distributed/decentralized search. Run your own crawler or be part of a network that distributes this out to each participating node.
Every centralized search engine has immensely hard-to-resist and powerful incentives to play "The Eye of Sauron" with your data. Additionally, they offer single points of compromise to other, far more powerful actors. Whatever guarantees DuckDuckGo gives you -and right now they don't give any- don't mean much, if they've been thoroughly (willingly or unwillingly) compromised.
Which doesn't mean one should always steer well clear just that one should at least be aware of the tradeoffs one makes when using a centralized search engine. And with DuckDuckGo's misleading marketing, I feel that this point is lost on significant chunks of its userbase.
Such search engines have been around for many years, and they suck donkey balls. Pardon my French. Install YaCy and tell me how you like it.
It wouldn't matter anyway, because decentralization doesn't really solve privacy any better than centralized search, besides the fact that it could theoretically provide more choices.
No matter what you use, privacy ultimately depends on trust. The reason that I have more trust for DDG than I do Google is, unlike Google, its primary audience is privacy-minded folks. If it came out that DDG was tracking users and selling that data, DDG would be immediately done as a brand. They at least have some incentive to do what they say. Decentralization provides no such benefit because a search "node" is unlikely to have any sort of meaningful brand to keep up.
> And with DuckDuckGo's misleading marketing, I feel that this point is lost on significant chunks of its userbase.
How is it misleading? My understanding from their marketing is that they don't create profiles of their users based on searches. Until we have evidence to the contrary, it's not outrageous to assume they are being truthful.
Yeah, now you're just saying "Nothing centralized can ever be trusted". So just say that rather than nitpicking their ToS. You weren't going to care what they said anyway.
Every centralized search engine has immensely hard-to-resist and powerful incentives to play "The Eye of Sauron" with your data. Additionally, they offer single points of compromise to other, far more powerful actors. Whatever guarantees DuckDuckGo gives you -and right now they don't give any- don't mean much, if they've been thoroughly (willingly or unwillingly) compromised.
Which doesn't mean one should always steer well clear just that one should at least be aware of the tradeoffs one makes when using a centralized search engine. And with DuckDuckGo's misleading marketing, I feel that this point is lost on significant chunks of its userbase.