DDG does not set a cookie that identifies you and as such has absolutely no way to have your ads or anything else be influenced by what you searched for earlier or what results you clicked on, outside of the single page you get when you search.
Check it for yourself using your favorite browsers developer console, there are no cookies, unless you set preferences and if so, the cookie is a very short string that indicates your preferences and is obvious not usable as a user id.
What they do is log what is searched for and what results and ads are clicked and that is not tied to you. Because they don’t have a concept of ‘you’, only of that one search.
And that is definitely not ‘same as Google’, Google automatically sets a user identifying cookie once you open the homepage, tries all kinds of tricks to tie this user id to your Google account and tracks anything you do to that account and remembers it forever. That’s why you only need to search for a car once to get ads for cars for weeks. Even if you clear your cookies. That’s Google tracking you. DuckDuckGo does not do that.
And it is really unfair to just accuse them of being ‘same as Google’. They are not same as Google, obviously they are not perfect but they do make the sacrifices while still making it work without tracking everything you do.
