I don't know if DDG does that exactly, but their help page does say this:
> Second, we measure engagement of specific events on the page (e.g. when a misspelling message is displayed, and when it is clicked). This allows us to run experiments where we can test different misspelling messages and use CTR (click through rate) to determine the message's efficacy. If you are looking at network requests, these are the ones going to the one-pixel image at improving.duckduckgo.com. These requests are anonymous and the information is used only by us to improve our products.
The Firefox network logger does show requests to this domain when I click on a link in the search results, before the page navigates away. This suggests to me they might by logging this information. To be clear, this is speculation on my part, because I haven't examined the URL parameters in detail.
In any case, I'm not sure how much this manages to improve the results, since usually I can get help with my Python query (for example) using whatever crappy blog post is first in the results, but results from the official docs or StackExchange are still probably better and should be prioritized.
> Second, we measure engagement of specific events on the page (e.g. when a misspelling message is displayed, and when it is clicked). This allows us to run experiments where we can test different misspelling messages and use CTR (click through rate) to determine the message's efficacy. If you are looking at network requests, these are the ones going to the one-pixel image at improving.duckduckgo.com. These requests are anonymous and the information is used only by us to improve our products.
The Firefox network logger does show requests to this domain when I click on a link in the search results, before the page navigates away. This suggests to me they might by logging this information. To be clear, this is speculation on my part, because I haven't examined the URL parameters in detail.
In any case, I'm not sure how much this manages to improve the results, since usually I can get help with my Python query (for example) using whatever crappy blog post is first in the results, but results from the official docs or StackExchange are still probably better and should be prioritized.