that control (so I can turn it off completely) is why I picked DDG to replace Google, who force feeds us the hallucinations

I've stopped using DDG now because of result quality. I now use a "meta" search backed by EXA, Tavily, and SearXNG in parallel. It can be agentically de-dupped or summarized as needed. Search as we knew it is done, largely because clicking through to evaluate result relevance before diving deeper sucks. Now we have agents that can do that portion and perform multiple searches, building on information in the last batch, to collect good results