Hister: A free & self-hosted personal search engine

spell:

Forgive me if I am wrong and that is what you were trying to say @asciimoo, but I don’t believe that he has said DuckDuckGo is doing these things at all. All I have seen him say is that using DuckDuckGo requires trust, same as Google or most other services , and he wants to eliminate that element of trust.

I agree, this is what I understood from Hister and to my understanding it is true. Search Engines are inherently problematic for privacy because you need to send the plaintext query/content to a third-party for it to be processed and return results. You can mitigate some of the metadata and fingerprinting problems (non-captcha’d Tor/VPN usage, JavaScript-free support, proxying etc.) but you cannot get around the original problem.