I have been using DDG for years. I inadvertently used google for a search (damn browser defaults) and i was genuinely difficult to find something relevant with the amount of ads cluttering it up.
Yeah, whenever I end up on google for whatever reason I get a nag screen to try to trick me into agreeing to their tracking crap (with no easy way to say "fuck off, no") and it seems to come back very frequently. I use ddg pretty much exclusively now.