The average tech person has been switching away from Google products, and this filters down to their social networks, and then their networks, and so on. It's a big deal when the tech people decide to switch.

For me, it was Chrome making me log-in to my account. Now I use Firefox, DDG, ublock, privacy badger, etc. I think society writ large will begin to take privacy more seriously in the coming years.

Edit FYI: If you want google results, add '!g' to the end of a DDG query and it will route to google. I use it sometimes, but not that often given that DDG is usually good.