[squarefoot]

DDG "worse" search results are also a product of you not being profiled. Or to put it in another way, Google better search results are also a product of all your habits being gathered and analyzed. Sadly we can't have a search engine that knows nothing about us and guesses at the same time what we are looking for. DDG can give better results, but this require being more specific when searching.

[bambax]

I'm not sure this is true. Google results are still amazing when used at a friends' or a public computer and not logged in, etc. (not to mention incognito mode, which you could argue still profiles you through your ip).

Other search engines feel like a noob salesperson who needs to be told 5 times in 5 different ways what you need -- and it's really simple stuff too.

I like experienced salespeople.

[creepydata]

Google results get "better" (depending on your definition of better) as you go in very specific ways. When I browse I clear cookies every time a tab is closed and I never log into Google just for searching. I've noticed at work I'll be googling for programing stuff and if my session gets "stale" (been doing a bunch of searches without closing the tab) I notice Google starts making assumptions about what I want. For example, if I Google a generic programming term say "string," on a stale session Google will assume the string I want is programming rather than, say, crafting or physics, and the string I want is the language I've been Googling in my last few search terms. So if I googled "string" in a fresh session I get a couple generic Wikipedia pages and some references from various programming language. If I Google "string" in a stale session Google "knows" I'm looking for the Java string so they will show me Java string results. If I wanted those same results I'd have to Google "Java string." It does make you lazy at searching though because you start thinking "Google knows what I'm talking about."

[jorvi]

DDG could still profile you via an account and just not sell the info to advertisers. Incorporate in Germany for the strong privacy protections, et voila :)