I actually think this gives one slightly better control. I've experienced a weird phenomenon on Facebook where a contact of mine kept posting borderline conspiracy theories and I kept correcting him, but now all I get are his posts and it's really quite infuriating.

I would prefer conscious filtering to this automated (and obscure) filtering that Google et al. utilise. I understand it's not for everyone, but it would suit me far better.

Sure it is more control. Just like pushing electrons with a magnetized needle is even more control. It doesn't mean it's convenient.

Now if you had an ML algorithm running in your browser that analyzed your preferences and transparently changed your DDG searches from "Django" to "Django web framework", you might get something closer to what you get with Google. Wonder if Firefox could make that happen.

Ddg lets you transfer settings cookies using "cloud save", or bookmarklets. Here is a bookmarklet:

https://duckduckgo.com/?kl=jp-jp&kae=t&kt=g

With cloud save, you pick a password, and have to type that in once on each device.

They don't support bubbling, or user profiling, so you can't dump/restore those.