Read about persistent cookies.

I addressed cookies in my comment. when you close an incognito window, all cookies are destroyed. cookies with or without an expiration date are destroyed. if you are using cookies without an expiration date, then those are NOT destroyed if you close your NON-incognito browser window. but if you are using incognito window, then all cookies are destroyed.

that said, if you're suggesting that folks will keep faux-cookies on their own site (e.g. store your user agent, IP, etc on their site along with your temp data) ... well, unless you are actively masking your user agent, IP, etc then you aren't protected (certainly not by duck duck go).

google has many services that consumers can use directly and others which are used by other web services that require the running of google code on your computer. It includes things like maps, analytics, adsense and CDN hosting.

if you use duck duck go then you use google for all those other things, then you really can't expect any privacy at all anyway.

Search is one of the most privacy killing applications they offer, and duckduckgo gives a much better alternative in that respect.

hence I said you can use incognito browsing for all those applications AND search. you can start multiple incognito windows (after using one product, close your windows and start a new session).

I also had very little problem in terms of search results.

agree to disagree? duck duck go search results are pretty mediocre, simply because their crawlers aren't as well written as google's. google is a fundamentally superior search engine: I don't use it because I have any allegiance to the company, I don't own stock in them, I don't give a damn about them as a company. they just are better at providing search results, that's all I care about.

Now I only use google search for images and sometimes news, but in terms of web search, duckduckgo is more than adequate.

sorry, but that completely makes your comment pointless. if you are using google services for gmail, maps, images, accessing Google's CDNs without a VPN ... protecting yourself by using duck duck go is EXACTLY the problem I'm talking about.

you seem to think that your internet usage is fairly private. but google knows everything about you already. and the worst part is, they know way more than you even understand.