DuckDuckGo is a search engine, like Google/Bing. This is a tool that uses those search engines and then combines the results. It's useful because Google sometimes has way better search results (imho) than DuckDuckGo, and this site gives you a way to search Google while being tracked less.

DuckDuckGo is also mostly just a meta-search engine. They do have their own webcrawler, but most results are still sourced from Yahoo!, Bing and the like.

You can search Google from DDG as well. In fact by using the same style bang prefixes as you do in Searx

For me that just redirects to a search on google.com

Well, DDG is owned by Yahoo... Also, it is not open source completely. So you cannot know if it is really tracking you or not.

You can't know if a public installation of an open source project is actually just running the code that you see either. Hosted open source projects have no security benefits over proprietary services.

And duckduckgo is not owned by yahoo. It has partnerships with yahoo, bing and yandex to use their search databases.

I agree with you. However, you can run your own instance of searx if you don't trust anyone. In case of DDG you don't have this option.

I am not sure that partnership or ownership really changes anything. But I hope I am wrong about it. :)

> I am not sure that partnership or ownership really changes anything.

It changes everything. DDG is a Yahoo customer and, as adrusi wrote, sources search data from them among other providers. Yahoo doesn't control DDG, its privacy measures, data collection, or product direction as they would as a parent company. The relationship is completely different.

I do agree with you about Searx having the optional self-hosting advantage. DDG claim they won't track you, but there's really no way to be certain.

I don't this this is correct. I believe they have a partnership/relationship of some kind. Could this[1] be what makes you think that

[1] - https://duck.co/help/company/yahoo-partnership

Which is now owned by Verizon.