"J. P. Gilliver (John)" wrote

| How is DDG funded?

This seems to be the deal:

DuckDuckGo makes money in two simple ways: Advertising and Affiliate
Marketing. Advertising is shown based on the keywords typed into the search
box. Affiliate revenues come from Amazon and eBay affiliate programs. When
users buy after getting on those sites through DuckDuckGo the company
collects a small commission.

If you'll recall, Google became a giant by posting text-based
ads next to search results. Clean, simple, useful, honest, brilliant.
But then they got greedy and it never stopped.

DDG uses Bing results, so they don't need to have a search
engine. That's also why they're not as good as Google. I use
Google occasionally. It doesn't require script. Though it often
tries to track me by giving me a rigged URL in links that goes
through their site. They don't give webmasters that data anymore,
but they still collect it for themselves.