Sometimes, yeah. My default is DDG, and I also use Kagi, but Google is still good at some stuff. Guess I’ll take the hit and just stop using it completely though. Kagi has been good enough, and also lets me search the fediverse for finding that dank meme I saw last week. Google used to be able to do that, but can’t shove as many ads in those queries I assume, so they dropped that ability.
Could very well be a mobile thing. I was pretty annoyed recently when logging into gcal for work on my phone, it refused to let me sign in without giving them my cell phone number. When I switched to wifi, it stopped bugging me, so clearly they pay attention to that sort of signal.