Like the author, I switched over when the google ad thing happened, and for the same reason. But instead of DDG, I decided to try out ecosia ( https://www.ecosia.org ) which is a wrapper over Bing. But they'll take all the ad revenue and use it to plant trees. So I get decent search results (bing isn't quite as good as google, but it's pretty decent for what I need) and also get to save the earth a little bit.