Tack “&udm=14” on to the end of a normal search, and you’ll be booted into the clean 10 blue links interface. While Google might not let you set this as a default, if you have a way to automatically edit the Google search URL, you can create your own defaults.
Duckduckgo suffers a lot of the same problems as google and other search engines. It’s just not getting progressively worse as fast as google. It’s still been getting worse and worse as time has gone on. I really dislike people who just point to another search engine like it’s the end all be all and don’t or won’t acknowledge that each one has problems and a lot of the problems overlap significantly. None of that fixes the problem or makes any of these companies backtrack on their terrible implementation of anti-user/anti-consumer policies.
For me it’s worse than Google. About half the time I have to run the search again in Google because none of the DDG links are relevant to my query.