It really depends on how susceptible the particular user is to the cost of being a part Google's ad network. If Google's ad network intelligently informs you to make better consumer decisions, then you can argue that you get paid to use Google's services. But unfortunately, too many people derive extreme negative value from being a part of it by being manipulated into making decisions that harm their lives. Even poorer people could easily be paying thousands of dollars in cost to their health (sugary drink and alcohol ads), bank account (financial scam ads), and community destruction (political misinformation ads).

DuckDuckGo looking nicer every day.

DDG is essentially just a reskin of Bing.

A privacy filter over Bing is fine by me. Lately I've been switching to incongnito every time I search for any product, video or anything to do with news or politics. It's getting ridiculous. I should just switch to DDG permanently.

Use startpage, then. It's a reskin over google, which seems to provide better results.

Yes. Google seems to think that a single video totally changes what you prefer, especially if it is some popular topic like politics or music. OTOH it'll take a lot of ted lectures and programming videos to make your feed more oriented to words those. Is it me, or does anybody else notice this?

DDG claims to have multiple searches, like local or specialized search engines, but if Bing shuts down they would probably be in trouble.

That said it’s irrelevant. Microsoft is happy to keep the competition alive for Google and I bet they are winning some revenue from their DDG deal, so it’s a win win.

And if DDG gets big enough, and it probably is already, they can develop their own web crawler - because in case you don’t know, it’s the crawling part that’s really expensive.

Apocryphally Bing stands for "but it's not Google", which would be delightfully apt here.

not exactly https://duck.co/help/results/sources