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.
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.
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...