My guess is that DDG is being held to a higher standard because it's the liferaft competitor in a world of Google data harvesting, targeted manipulation and sel

My guess is that DDG is being held to a higher standard because it's the liferaft competitor in a world of Google data harvesting, targeted manipulation and selling customer data. Most complaining or being heavily critical about DDG are probably already upset to the point of abandonment with other services and they don't want the same trend to happen to this competitor (DDG). This sort of reaction is, IMHO, due to poor diversity of viable competitors. In our societal structure, competitive options are the only things that keep power in check. I'm personally not entirely convinced you can have a reasonable amount of diverse competition in our economic system and there are some inherent equilibria that we tend to converge on over and over again in a market space (without corresponding massive social equalibria shifts). If you do have any sort of faith left in our economic system, then you certainly want competitors like DDG to be different and be successful. Even if you don't have much faith, outside of say stringent regulation, supporting these sort of competitors is really the only practical option we have in the current state of affairs.