I’m not really understanding what you wanna tell me with “you are the customer”. They display ads at the top of your search results and that’s how they make money. Considering that, yes, you are the customer. But they don’t track you and your search queries are anonymized so they respect your privacy. With an adblocker you don’t even see the ads. You can make an account to earn PRE (the crypto currency they use) with your search queries. But you don’t need to do that. You could even run your own node server(s) and earn even more because you’re helping the search engine by being a part of the infrastructure. But you can ignore all that and just use the search engine.

Anyway I’m really satisfied with the search results. Didn’t even feel the need to switch to another search engine since I’ve started using it a few months ago.