Tor enables Internet anonymity by routing your traffic through a series of encrypted relays.
DuckDuckGo now operates one of these relays, and more importantly an exit enclave for DDG search engine traffic.
That means if you're on Tor, and you access DDG, you'll likely exit through our relay and get service much faster. Tor can be slow, but this should speed it up a bit (when using DuckDuckGo).
I believe this fits right in line with our privacy policy. Using Tor and DDG, you can now be end to end anonymous with your searching. And if you use our encrypted homepage, you can be end to end encrypted as well.
I should point out that people are often scared of operating Tor relays due to potential abuse issues. Those issues scared me off too, at first. But with this exit enclave setup, there are no abuse issues. Only DDG traffic exits from our relay.
Even if you have only 20KB of bandwidth to spare, you can set up a bridge relay that just routes traffic between nodes and never lets anyone out through your relay. That helps the cause, and it is really easy to set up. You can limit bandwidth to just the amount you want to give. Check out the FAQ.
Update: there is now a DuckDuckGo hidden service at 3g2upl4pq6kufc4m.onion
