Im no Google shill, but the results DDG returns are terrible. I suspect for search to work well, the engine needs to know a bit about the user - especially if localising the results is important to you.

I've been fine with duck duck go, I occasionally go to google if i can't find something.

Using a search engine efficiently is a lost skill these days and has been replaced by search engines knowing more bout you and making assumptions about your search intentions.

Given that half of users report search modifiers have ceased working entirely with Google, and many other engines don't handle them well if at all, the skill isn't lost so much as impossible to apply.

DuckDuckGo may not be tracking you on their website, but Chrome is tracking you all the time. A majority of companies partnered with Google to get data on what sites you visit, and what data Google can share about you.

Not just that, Chrome also doesn't respect your privacy settings across some websites especially owned by Google:

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-to-face-5b-lawsui...

They also are going to block your AdBlockers from blocking ads with Manifest V3

The details about that lawsuit in the link do not seem like google is subverting anon mode to me. They just use usual cookie tracking, so they can track you if you are logged in to some site that uses google analytics (ie analytics isn't turned off, but when you start anon mode you have a clean slate and all is deleted at the end).

I was more worried about was google adding a hidden tracking cookie when I delete all my cookies somehow identifying me. Or was the browser sending all my traffic to google directly somehow.

Use Brave browser, they have their own search engine called Brave Search.