Linux Mint has signed an exclusive deal with DuckDuckGo, the new search engine which uses Microsoft Bing in the back-end.

If you search DuckDuckGo for open source office suite, you will not find LibreOffice on top. It's buried at the bottom, similar to Microsoft Bing. On the contrary if you search Google for the same keywords, LibreOffice is the second result. If you search for simply office suite then also you will never reach to LibreOffice. So, DuckDuckGo users will never know there exists an office suite called LibreOffice.

Google: 4th results was Mozilla	DuckDuckGo: No result of Mozilla or Chrome on top/front page.

Search: Open Source Web Browsers:
DuckDuckGo: No result of Mozilla or Chrome on top/front page.
Google: 4th results was Mozilla

Google: LibreOffice was the third results	DuckDuckGo: No results of LibreOffice in the top

Search: Open Source Office Suite:
DuckDuckGo: No results of LibreOffice in the top
Google: LibreOffice was the third results

Google: Ubuntu and FSF as the top 3rd result.	DuckDuckGo: No mention of Linux or GNU on first page top results

Search: open source operating systems
DuckDuckGo: No mention of Linux or GNU on first page top results
Google: Ubuntu and FSF as the top 3rd result.

DuckDuckGo go mainly showed results from news sites and blogs and did not show the sites of the projects. On the contrary Google shows the sites of the projects such as Mozilla, LibreOffice, Ubuntu or GNU.

The results of DuckDuckGo resembles the results of Microsoft Bing which allegedly filters open source projects.

So, the question arises how 'accurate' are DuckDuckGo results? Since its a closed source search engine, there is no such benefit one gets over Google. Other than the fact that it doesn't track you. Is that important? Depends on what is more important to you. Personally, I care more about relevant results as I have kept the history off and delete cookies every time the browser closes. A search engine's primary goal is to provide relevant results which I don't think DuckDuckGo does very well.

DuckDuckGo while doesn't use the 'filter' bubble used by Google to show relevant results (depending on your location and previous search), DuckDuckGo shows unfiltered results. However there are exceptions. DuckDuckGo does filter results. According to Wikipedia, DuckDuckGo deletes search results for companies it believes are content mills, like Demand Media's eHow. DuckDuckGo attempts to filter pages with lots of advertising.

The core of DuckDuckGo is not open source so I don't know how an open source user would look at it. However, it is always good to have alternatives. With Linux Mint's setting DDG as the default search engine it will get quite a lot of traffic and I think DDG needs to improve search results so that relevant open source projects are not buried under the results.