DDG was never a search company and that's why you will notice it never talked much about quality of search results, just privacy. It was a middle-man between th

DDG was never a search company and that's why you will notice it never talked much about quality of search results, just privacy. It was a middle-man between the user and Bing / Yandex, with a branding focused on privacy. They didn't really have much control over search quality because they never had an index. So it's not surprising that they are going all in on their privacy branding with other paraphernalia instead of focusing on improving search quality. Also privacy and search quality are often unrelated, but sometimes opposed to each other. If I have more data about you I might be able to serve slightly more relevant results. But the enshittification of Google search quality wasn't due to privacy-related reasons. It's because the internet itself is shittier. Organic search is a reflection of that.