DDG is using a very old version of Google’s business model: they serve ads based on your search string. That’s it. No search history mining. No email reading. No broadly deployed analytics snippets and browser logins to reconstruct your whole browsing history.

I’m already sending my search query to DDG for them to give me search results. They don’t ask for any additional data. They just allow advertisers to bid on the first few results for a particular topic.

I’m ok with that.