There's some truth to the pattern, though; Once you're no longer the underdog, those seeking power will seek you out, and it's hard to prevent infiltration by the power-hungry.
If there weren't huge companies offering search APIs, DDG simply couldn't compete with Google (without massive scale of their own). As it is, DDG still provides somewhat weaker results in some cases; it is still my primary search engine on all of my devices, and I like it, but when I'm frustrated by the results, I make use of !g and usually find what I'm looking for.