Last week, DuckDuckGo tweeted that they have had zero search warrants since their founding in 2008. That’s because they don’t log their users’ searches so there’s no useful information for law enforcement to demand access to. Contrast that to Google who last year had 11,554 geofence warrants. To channel the meme, if you collect it, they will come. What DDG has shown is that if you don’t collect it, they will leave you and your users alone.
I was disappointed with the tweet’s comments. They mostly fell into the “Yeah but the XYZ search engine is better” or the “Yeah but the guvment will issue secret warrants forcing them record queries and not reveal it” categories.
I’m not sure that the second complaint is reasonable in the U.S. There have been such warrants targeted at specific individuals but a general warrant targeting everyone would doubtless run into fourth amendment issues.
As far as which search engine is best, that’s a war I don’t want to enlist in. Irreal commenters I trust have recommended Brave and I do use it but my go to search engine is still DDG and I find it adequate for most uses. Brave, I find, does have slightly more comprehensive results so I fall back to it if I need to bear down. Truth to tell, I suspect that the search engine with the best results—once you filter out all the nonsense—is Google but then your search data is being logged and you could be caught up—perfectly innocently—in some law enforcement dragnet having nothing to do with you.
I think we should all take a moment and celebrate DDG—and yes, the others—for keeping our data so safe that law enforcement doesn’t bother trying to get it out of them.