No, there hasn't been any backtracking on this. The full quote continues "On Google, you get results tailored to what they think you’re likely to click on, based on the data profile they’ve built on you over time."
Unlike other search engines (like Google), we don’t alter search results based on someone’s previous search history. In fact, since we don’t track our users we don’t have access to search histories at all. Those other search engines show you results based on a data profile about you and your online activity (including your search history), and so can be slanted towards what they think you will click on the most based on this profiling. This effect is commonly known as the search filter bubble, but using DuckDuckGo can help you escape it.
This does not mean our search results are generally “unfiltered” because, for every search you make online, a search engine’s job is to filter millions of possible results down to a ranked order of just a handful. In other words, a search engine has to use algorithms programmed by people to determine what shows up first in the list of results, what shows up second, and so on. Otherwise, for every search you’d just get a completely random set of results, which of course wouldn’t be very useful.
However, we do this ranking in a strictly non-partisan manner, and not based on my politics (or anyone's for that matter). I left another comment here on how that works: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31557837
Unlike other search engines (like Google), we don’t alter search results based on someone’s previous search history. In fact, since we don’t track our users we don’t have access to search histories at all. Those other search engines show you results based on a data profile about you and your online activity (including your search history), and so can be slanted towards what they think you will click on the most based on this profiling. This effect is commonly known as the search filter bubble, but using DuckDuckGo can help you escape it.
This does not mean our search results are generally “unfiltered” because, for every search you make online, a search engine’s job is to filter millions of possible results down to a ranked order of just a handful. In other words, a search engine has to use algorithms programmed by people to determine what shows up first in the list of results, what shows up second, and so on. Otherwise, for every search you’d just get a completely random set of results, which of course wouldn’t be very useful.
However, we do this ranking in a strictly non-partisan manner, and not based on my politics (or anyone's for that matter). I left another comment here on how that works: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31557837