[wzdd]

> I tend to think of most "tracking" not as "stalking" but as "relationship building."

That is just another term (and a significantly creepier one) for the same thing, for those people who don't want that kind of relationship. A good rule of thumb would be to assume that people who "don't want to be tracked" have already considered the fact that tracking may help the company in question improve its service to them -- after all, this is frequently given as the justification for tracking.

From this viewpoint ("I don't want that kind of relationship, and am prepared to live with the associated service degradation"), it is logical to switch to services for which your envisaged greater accountability isn't necessary.

Incidentally, I have issues with DDG simply because it will return Android programming results from 2011 in preference to those from 2014, despite the entire state of play having changed in those three years, because it was a really good result in 2011 -- or because it simply doesn't seem to index as much of the Web. These are just anecdotes, but in my personal experience the "relationship" I have with Google search isn't a very large part of why it's good.