The important bit of the article is the quote at the end, which I will quote in full:

> Most of the money is still made without tracking people by showing you ads based on your keyword, i.e. type in car and get a car ad. These ads are lucrative because people have buying intent. All that tracking is for the rest of the Internet without this search intent, and that's why you're tracked across the Internet with those same ads.

They don't link to their source, but a simple search solved that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10346440

And for good measure, I also ran the search through Google. On Google it's the top hit; on DDG I have to pagedown once. (A random selection of words, without punctuation or apostrophes, quoted to do a literal search.)

Thanks for this link, it's a short article but I hadn't heard about it. I switched my default search engine to DDG about a year ago (occasionally using !g syntax for Google search), and really appreciate their service. I'm glad to hear they've found a profitable model that doesn't need to track users.