Over the last few months I have been working on an alternative search engine. Maybe naively, I thought the most difficult part was going to be to convince people to use it, but the real challenge if figuring out a way to monetize the service in a way that maintains privacy and respects users. The more I go down this path, the more I realize the next big search engine will be one that provides better results AND comes up with a better way for monetization.
I wrote a little about it here [0] if anyone is interested.
[0] https://coil.com/p/runnaroo/Privacy-and-Search-Engine-Moneti...
"Display advertising that is not provided by Microsoft on any page that displays any part of a response."
DDG is big enough that they are probably on a completely separate agreement than the standard TOS though.
[0] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cognitive-services/bi...
Most people don't realize this, but DDG doesn't sell their own advertising, they use Microsoft's advertising network! This just seems bizarre to me that they're outsourcing the whole reason they're supposed to be independent of the other search engines.
I tried signing up for Microsoft's network, but it was a bad user interface (typical MS), very confusing, and I couldn't really figure out how to specifically target DDG and only DDG. I just gave up.
DDG needs to bring advertising in-house, or I don't see why they have a reason to exist. They're almost a subsidiary of MS at this point.