Considering DDG’s privacy claims cannot be independently verified (and their MS tracking fiasco 2 years ago) they should be treated with the same level of caution that Startpage gets.

I used to use startpage but just recently switched back to ddg. for some reason on my browser the search would return errors or sometimes I’d type my search query and it would just load the homepage of the site. Sometimes it just feels like there is no winning. :/