If this decision was because of legal pressure by Google, I don't see how that got resolved in a matter of days. Which means it wasn't because of Google, but rather a poor decision made by DDG management. How can people trust their product now?
The removals were a rarity. It's not as if you can't add a `!g` bang query to redirect to Google if you can't find something. And DDG is rampant with all sorts of stuff that shouldn't be there, so I don't think they're hellbent on censorship.
You don’t always know what you don’t know.
If I don’t know about YouTube-dl and I search “download YouTube command line”, how am I going to know that ddg is hiding the best result from me?
This definitely isn’t a small annoyance kind of problem, in my eyes. It’s a deal breaker. I’ll never use ddg again. If they’re going to censor like Google does, then I’m going to use Google because it generally has better results. Ddg needs to offer something beyond what Google offers to make up for their bad results, and they aren’t doing that.
If you're searching on google for medical terms it builds a profile on you, and you should be concerned that they could be selling that information to insurers, directly or indirectly.
Is this really going on? Maybe not, but is it worth it to ignore the risk? Can you just use DDG so it isn't a question?
(except in reality it's less simple than "they know your occupation", it's a huge cloud of data points that an ai makes correlations and assosciations that no human actually knows. It means the searches would also be weighted by indirect things like, not only your occupation but your assosciations. Say you don't have the medical occupation, but your computer makes a lot of medical searches, because your roomate in your college dorm has a medical major etc. And right now, the ais are still pretty stupid and absolutely making a lot of obvious unsafe conclusions, but they also do get more and more spooky every day.)
But this doesn't make it any better. If they did a perfectly accurate job of profiling you, that is not better than doing an inaccurate job.
That much insight is like being married to someone, where they intimately know all your biases and motivations, know all your buttons, know how to manipulate you, know how to weigh any opinions you might express against their knowledge of where you got every idea you ever had,
except it isn't a marriage, and they aren't subject to all that same vulnerability to you, and they aren't even a human but a corporation, and they have this intimate knowledge of everyone not just one spouse or sibling or best friend.
Edit: I was wrong.
TPB is the first result too. IIRC at one point searching for TPB only returned proxy sites, but that doesn’t appear to be the case now.