Within DuckDuckGo Search we show favicons (small website logos) for a better user experience. These favicons are requested from our servers rather than from websites directly, because it can be surprisingly complicated to locate a favicon for a website — they can be stored in a variety of locations and in a variety of formats. We’ve developed our behind-the-scenes service to understand these edge cases and simplify retrieval within our search engine.
At DuckDuckGo, we don’t track you, ever. That’s our privacy policy in a nutshell. For example, we do not create unique cookies and, more generally, architect our product so that we do not even have the ability to create a search or browsing history for any individual — it’s privacy by design.
Updates to favicons should occur automatically over a period of a few weeks. If you are seeing a persistent problem, please let us know.
Prior versions on GitHub.