When you search on DDG, it sends it to bing via their servers. Bing doesnt know you are searching, it can only see duckduckgo and the search term, not you. DDG

When you search on DDG, it sends it to bing via their servers. Bing doesnt know you are searching, it can only see duckduckgo and the search term, not you. DDG gets results back from bing, sometimes modifying it with it's own results to make them better. > But I think you're talking about which index it is that DDG queries internally to yield regular (non-bang) search results? Yes. Most of it is Bing. Ecosia doesn't proxy it properly. It sends it to bing from you browser, not from Ecosia's servers. Bing knows your IP and sets cookies to track you. You can observe it with dev tools. They might have changed it since I last checked.