Full URL is: https://html.duckduckgo.com/html/?t=lm&q=test
Its main search (which only works if JS is enabled) doesn't seem to have that.
This is similar to how Google tracks their search results.
Why such a privacy oriented search engine implemented this, is beyond me.
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When you click on a link in our results page, your search terms are not sent to the site that you click on, which can be the case on other search engines due to something called HTTP "referers".
On modern browsers we accomplish this by adding a small piece of code to our page called Meta referrer. Some browsers (especially older ones) do not support this standard, however. For those browsers, and also in situations where meta referrer doesn't work, we send the request back to our servers to remove search terms. This redirect goes through r.duckduckgo.com.
You can disable this privacy feature. To do that, go to the settings page, select Privacy, and change the option Redirect to Off.
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Though what about the users that simply use the HTML only site without any cookies? What about Tor browser users?
I see that it's only possible to set the settings if you first go to the standard version of DDG, and afterwards it requires cookies in order to remember that choice.
You can turn this off in your settings if you like, but it's actually there to protect your privacy.
Referrer-Policy: no-referrer
is very small, and at the same time this allows them to gather statistics on which links are clicked, the latter is a far bigger privacy concern.
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On modern browsers we accomplish this by adding a small piece of code to our page called Meta referrer. Some browsers (especially older ones) do not support this standard, however. For those browsers, and also in situations where meta referrer doesn't work, we send the request back to our servers to remove search terms. This redirect goes through r.duckduckgo.com.
You can disable this privacy feature. To do that, go to the settings page, select Privacy, and change the option Redirect to Off.
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Tracking links is not necessarily tracking people, violating privacy, etc.
I'm not necessarily defending DDG. I just want to ensure that if we're going to feel that our privacy is being violated, it actually is.
A simple search would have yielded this answer but yet you chose to make this damaging statement without any due diligence.