Google didn't start out with the premise of "lets monetize people's data under the guise of search." He even states "I think they should be set up to be the minimal collection as needed, as opposed to the maximal collection possible." I take this to mean collection has begun and it will be interesting to see how their policies change. Sure, they may not add personalized search results, but that does not mean they cannot implement IP/search indexing and be the subject of a government request for this data.
The best feature, if you are concerned about quality of search and privacy, is the bang syntax[1]. !g $search and you can have the best of both worlds.
[1] https://duckduckgo.com/bang.html