“Taking a step back, I know our product is not perfect and will never be.

“I hope this provides some helpful context,” said Weinberg. Weinberg’s response was greeted warmly by users saying the comprehensive and technical explanation was “refreshing” and one user said it improved their perception of the company.ĭuckDuckGo’s agreement with Microsoft has been disclosed before and in one article on the company’s help page, it informs users that Microsoft can see the full IP address of a user so it can properly charge advertisers when a user clicks on a Microsoft-provided advert.

That said, it still believes it offers much greater privacy compared to other browsers and understands the confusion held by users given that it's ultimately a search syndication contract that is preventing DuckDuckGo from doing things unrelated to search. “Really only two companies (Google and Microsoft) have a high-quality global web link index (because I believe it costs upwards of a billion dollars a year to do), and so literally every other global search engine needs to bootstrap with one or both of them to provide a mainstream search product.” “While a lot of what you see on our results page privately incorporates content from other sources, including our own indexes (e.g., Wikipedia, Local listings, Sports, etc.), we source most of our traditional links and images privately from Bing (though because of other search technology our link and image results still may look different),” said Weinberg.

The reason why DuckDuckGo has to permit Microsoft’s third-party trackers for Microsoft only is due to distribution requirements associated with its agreement to display some Bing search results in its browser. The CEO said this is something that most other browsers don’t attempt to do because blocking such scripts often leads to visited websites breaking.

Duckduckgo founder