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Because it's traffic they can serve ads to. Why wouldn't they? It's 100% win for them. They're getting someone who is dissatisfied with another search engine to try and win them over

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It's a win, but not a wash, because they cannot serve highly targeted ads, which means they probably can't charge as much and people are less likely to click on.

Try to create a separate google account, use browser profiles, and this particular account only for searches in a specialized field (say CS, IT etc...). Than start looking at the ads you're getting. Google can't do that if the request comes from ddg.

It doesn't proxy the request to google, it issues a redirect to google and your browser does the request, with all its cookies.

So what's the point of using ddg instead of google if you do this?

It's just a quick way for the user to also try Google. I usually do search in DDG (default search) if I don't get good results I append !g to get results. Most often though Google doesn't give me much better results.

Lack of certain information is a valuable data point. Privacy-conscious searchers are served by many small but profitable niche industries.

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