One fix is to not directly send the users to the result page. Instead link to a redirect script on the ddg servers i.e, duckduckgo.com/goto.php?link=http://search-result.com/ and then have goto.php remove the REFERER from the request headers.

Not sure if that will work in all browsers, iirc a 301 or a 302 can still pass those headers on. The only trick I know of that will not do that is by using a 'meta refresh' with a time set to '0', but that has bad implications for the working of the 'back' button.

I haven't tested this out, but I don't see why something like this wouldn't work...

<?php

   header("Location: the-result.com");

   header("Referer: ");

?>

Referer is a header the browser sends, Location is a header the server sends. Also, the Location header needs either a relative url on the local machine or a fully qualified one. In this case it would have needed a fully qualified one.

So maybe you should have tested it ;) ?

I wouldn't say there is a trivial fix. One option would be to encrypt the search term client-side with blowfish (or some other 2-way hash scheme) and use that as the url string.

Erm.. You probably mean something like a "symmetric block cipher", such as Blowfish. The point of (cryptographic) hashes is that they're one way only.

But as for a fix, at least Opera offers the option of never sending referrer information. That would be enough in this case.

Firefox offers that option as well - you just have to go to about:config and set network.http.sendRefererHeader to 0.

Don't put offsite images in secure searches.

These aren't really offsite images. ddgw.s3.amazonaws.com is a server instance run by DDG. It just happens to live in Amazon's cloud.

Yes, but the headers are sent in plaintext.

I don't think they are actually: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/499591/are-https-urls-enc...

That was about the headers to the image server which was not using https at the time I believe ?

No, they aren't.

Not any more but they were when that was written. See: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1362122