[reitanqild]

> What is the tangible gain of this self-sabotaging ?

Is it self sabotaging to not drive a Mercedes (or Audi or Tesla or what you think is best).

Or is it a choice you made to go down a notch in quality to gain something else?

Edit: besides I originally moved because I was really annoyed that Google couldn't respect my searches, so I didn't feel I lost much.

Sadly lately DDG has been copying Googles bad habit of fuzzing my searches to death.

[utopcell]

Yes it is, if <insert your favorite expensive car here> is the same price as your Hyundai (that is, free). If however you moved because you found Google's results to be inferior, then that is a perfectly valid reason.

As for the "something else" gain, my concern with this is that it is only claimed, not observed. You don't know what DDG does with your data, you have their word for it. You might think that they don't use your data because you don't see personalized results, but what people forget is that DDG is not a search engine in itself but rather a wrapper around other search engines: Bing, and the Russian search engine Yandex. At least Bing does not provide personalized search results as-a-service.

[reitanqild]

> Yes it is, if <insert your favorite expensive car here> is the same price as your Hyundai (that is, free). If however you moved because you found Google's results to be inferior, then that is a perfectly valid reason.

In my case the price was higher and for a while the results were better.