either they truly have lost touch with their userbase or the large majority of users simply do not care. in any case i'd love to use DDG but the results simply isn't good and I always end up coming back to google. just wish we could give them less information.

but seems they are anti-competitive, youtube vanced is another recent example.

DDG has also announced that their search results would be affected by their political biases.

Source: https://mobile.twitter.com/yegg/status/1501716484761997318

I hate to say it, but I can't stick with DDG. It's bad enough for my uses, that I have to constantly switch back to google.

I know mileage may vary for others.

same situation, although I recall, there is another search engine that anonymizes your google search....just can't recall what it's called

It's called startpage.

yes!

weird thing after I installed it, google chrome immediately used a dark pattern to get me to disable it. if I had been a below user average, i would've given up!

Try Kagi. Free in beta, paid-for in due course, but excellent results.

The Internet is theirs. When will we take it back?

At least the other way around is true sometimes, that the internet thinks Google's search results are theirs.