I don't have any particular trust in them. However, they've staked their entire business model on privacy. That would be foolish if their intent is to sell user info, because doing that is unlikely to stay private for long.

Their entire business model is [selling advertisements][0], same as Google.

[0]: https://help.duckduckgo.com/company/advertising-and-affiliat...

DDG is using a very old version of Google’s business model: they serve ads based on your search string. That’s it. No search history mining. No email reading. No broadly deployed analytics snippets and browser logins to reconstruct your whole browsing history.

I’m already sending my search query to DDG for them to give me search results. They don’t ask for any additional data. They just allow advertisers to bid on the first few results for a particular topic.

I’m ok with that.

Innocent until proven guilty. By your logic no new company can ever build anything which preserves privacy.

You cannot prove a service preserves your privacy. You can only prove that it does not preserve it.

How do you prove that you’re privacy focused? You have to somehow prove that there’s something you did’t do. That’s kinda hard, and not much different from keeping it a secret.