I guess because it makes zero sense the way it is. What's the point? Might as well have gone to Google directly. And what DDG user would ever want to be redirected to Google? They're using DDG for a reason (and for 99%, it isn't the search engine quality). It just makes no sense.

> I'm [sic] can't see how that could possibly be more anonymized then [sic] just going to google.com yourself.

DDG could proxy the traffic the way startpage does.

There are over 10.000 different bang shortcuts. They’re very valuable for several reasons, especially if you make DDG your default search engine. “Denmark !w” will take you to Denmark’s Wikipedia page, saving you the time and bandwidth it would take to click on the link through the DDG/Google result. Similarly, you can search “hello !gtda”; and sure, for short translation queries then you could also just type “hello danish” in Google, but try doing that with an entire paragraph. You could also search “duckduckgo !gandi” to see available duckduckgo domains on Gandi (or whichever domain registrar you prefer).

> And what DDG user would ever want to be redirected to Google? They're using DDG for a reason (and for 99%, it isn't the search engine quality). It just makes no sense.

DDG users aren’t (or at least they shouldn’t) append !g to all their searches.. it should only be used as a last resort (and even then they should still be using !s instead of !g). DDG’s primary selling point is privacy, but even if they were just as evil as Google (and there were no other privacy-friendly alternative available) then I’d still be using DDG as my default search engine thanks to the bang shortcuts.

> DDG could proxy the traffic the way startpage does.

That would defeat the purpose of the bang shortcuts, which is to take you to the search results on other sites. Besides, they already offer this through !s.