The idea of it is, but DDG isn't. I used it for a couple of years but rarely felt it was good enough, I kept having to go back to Google or even Bing or Yandex to get the results I needed. One of my major gripes was it not showing the dates on results, so I never knew if the information was up to date without clicking through to every result and checking it there. Then I kept seeing pretty bad news about it, the company doing stuff people, including me, didn't appreciate.

I know some will hate on me for this, but I've now used Kagi for about a year and it's by far the best I've ever used. If or when that goes bad I'll find something else, but right now nothing comes close to giving me both the right results and also giving me control over everything. Of course, there are negatives but that's the case with everything else too. None of the "bad" news about it has turned out to be even close to as bad as first reported, and the rest is just people hating on it because others say they like it.

Duckduckgo suffers a lot of the same problems as google and other search engines. It's just not getting progressively worse as fast as google. It's still been getting worse and worse as time has gone on. I really dislike people who just point to another search engine like it's the end all be all and don't or won't acknowledge that each one has problems and a lot of the problems overlap significantly. None of that fixes the problem or makes any of these companies backtrack on their terrible implementation of anti-user/anti-consumer policies.