HACKER Q&A
📣 danShumway

Has DDG always rewritten URLs on its non-JS search?


I've noticed recently that if I use DDG with Javascript turned off, page URLS get rewritten to go through DDG with an ID attached to them. Ex:

https://html.duckduckgo.com/html?q=duckduckgo%20tracking

Shows its urls in the format:

https://duckduckgo.com/l/?uddg=https%3A%2F%2Fhelp.duckduckgo.com%2Fduckduckgo%2Dhelp%2Dpages%2Fprivacy%2Fweb%2Dtracking%2Dprotections%2F&rut=a4221949d4d60ca8654aabbfa5700d5d94369f6481bf45c8ac4d6906fd6d63fb

It's possible that this has been happening for a while and I didn't notice it, but I could have sworn this didn't use to happen; I've sold people on using DuckDuckGo by telling them that it didn't rewrite URLS. Was I wrong, or is this a newer change?

The JS-enabled page doesn't change the URL, but it does intercept load events and tries to contact improving.duckduckgo.com. That's a more recent change, and one that uBlock Origin already handles I think. URL rewrites I didn't know about and are a bit harder to deal with. They're also obviously fairly disappointing to see; I'm not sure how tracking which specific link a user clicks on isn't tracking that user, even if the data is "anonymized".

  👤 danShumway Accepted Answer ✓
Blocking the redirect to html.duckduckgo.com/html is easy, it's just:

  duckduckgo.com##^noscript
in uBlock Origin. But DuckDuckGo's normal site does need Javascript, it won't work without it. And to the best of my knowledge, UBO doesn't have URL rewriting support, so fixing urls would require a second extension.

Enabling JS by default for DuckDuckGo seems to be the better solution, since then UBO can just block the tracking requests. But as a user it makes me feel a lot less fuzzy about the site.