I am fairly certain that I was on my Kindle Fire tablet. I think I followed a link on this thread; perhaps that is why I ended up at Google.
I know what you mean about DuckDuckGo; I use it and sometimes Yahoo, when Duck does not produce what I am looking for. I know, Yahoo is prob connected to Google; I have heard that Duck used the same stuff as Google. With me, when Google first came on line I felt the Holy Spirit warned me off of it; everyone on FR was raving about it. I had to follow what I thought was right.
I know Google tracks me; I can see it on my browser's lower margin. That is not my issue. I simply had to follow that 'voice'.
I created a cgi script that pulled the top searches from about 17 different search engines in the 90s for my own use. I think I would have to update the code to get rid of Alta Vista and several others. .