I don't understand that argument at all. What's the threat model? I think it's entirely reasonable to be in the following posture: I want as much privacy for m

I don't understand that argument at all. What's the threat model? I think it's entirely reasonable to be in the following posture: I want as much privacy for my web searches as I can reasonably achieve without having to run a search engine myself. I'm willing to trust that search providers are not saving personally identifiable information or passively turning over search data to law enforcement if they claim that they are not in their terms of service. That's pretty much the use case for DDG. With Bing you know they are violating your privacy. With DDG you have a promise in writing that they are not. It's hard to see how that's not strictly better than what you get from Bing if privacy is among your core desiderata.