I love that they make their traffic numbers available. I have been using ddg and graphing/predicting the next days traffic since March here: https://qunc.co/ddg.
Definitely a different trajectory since late summer.
I don't want to hijack or anything, but just want to also link to a project I did that also looked at these ads and lets you browse/categorize them interactively: https://qunc.co/russia_facebook_project/
Some stats about the data set:
There were 3,419 ads.
They had approximately 40 million impressions.
Approximately 3.7 million clicks.
And, surprisingly to me, cost only around 117,000 USD in total
I remember 10 years ago Nuance used legal threats to eliminate competition in this field, to the extent that greatly discouraged any startup speech recognition companies.
Google was able to get around it, just because they became heavier..
Definitely a different trajectory since late summer.