I enjoyed the episode a lot, but I do agree about the product placement. It really was unnecessary and jarring.
Heh... I didn't notice the product placement at all. I'll have to watch again and see what y'all are talking about.
I'm pretty agnostic regarding brands. It just doesn't register to me, and advertisements usually disappear as background noise. If there's a can of Coke™ on the table, I don't usually recognize it as a proprietary brand, and translate it to "soda".
The mentioning of DuckDuckGo seemed weird/misplaced
Perhaps. DDG is kind of a clumsy name, and it's hard to say without throwing a bunch of rocks in the speech machine. I'll have to watch that part again to get the exact phrasing/context. Maybe a generic "search" would have worked better, but I'm generally ok with not giving google any more mindshare.