Wow, that is definitely an unbiased independent source. I don't buy it, I don't think it refutes anything and I'm not taking the claims of a PR statement at face value.

We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we also source from multiple partners, though most commonly from Bing (and none from Google).

This much is probably true, only StartPage uses the Google API directly out of the two but you have to realize Google's stranglehold is not just through search, they have trackers on something like 80-90% of the web. They know what you're searching for, end of story.

What bothers me is that DuckDuckGo often just gives me the same results as Google anyway. This is because they clearly take advertising money from the same people. When you can literally pay DuckDuckGo to push your link to the top of the search results, Google and DuckDuckGo will end up displaying similar results when ad money is involved. Even when that isn't the case, DuckDuckGo is not the end all solution to your search problems. Bottom line is this, DuckDuckGo may not create an individual profile on you and tailor results to that profile like Google does but they advertise based on keywords and engagement obviously. It doesn't matter if you use a VPN. It is better to just use something like StartPage because it lets you use Google without the personalized profile and tailored search results while aggregating the results with other search engines. To me personally, DuckDuckGo and Google are two sides to the same coin because they both seem to make it difficult to find what I'm looking for