DDG never pretended to be unbiased. They have all the same policy decisions around artificial boosting/throttling as google without the tracking.

In their golden era search engines were essentially super sophisticated keyword matching. Users used to find novel websites from passionate people. Now it's becoming more of a social media feed of the same 100 website where you train it what you like.

This is exactly why search is so vulnerable to disruption from LLMs.

>From sharing user data with Microsoft

Citation? I can't find this.

>to hiding websites in search due to political bias

This is a gross mischaracterization. Every search engine down weights domains and pages with bad or inaccurate information. Their entire purpose is to find good information, not penis enlargement 4 u .ru pages.

You're getting downvoted pretty heavily. Do you have sources for that? I did a quick search on Kagi and couldn't find anything to support what you say.

For "sharing data with microsoft": https://techcrunch.com/2022/05/24/ddg-microsoft-tracking-blo...

For "hiding websites in search", they may be referring to DDG downranking russian propaganda sites during the russian-ukraine war: https://www.pcmag.com/news/duckduckgo-to-down-rank-sites-ass...