I was expecting DDG to be one of them (before I read the report), so I did some digging and it seems that they have <https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Reference/...> set to "origin", meaning it says that the request came from duckduckgo.com but nothing further
<meta name="referrer" content="origin">
But, to answer your question, presumably a search engine that wanted to stay really under the radar could use that same mechanism to choose "no-referrer" and the traffic would seem organic
(I also had a good chuckle at them choosing to break the typo chain with this directive)
I was expecting DDG to be one of them (before I read the report), so I did some digging and it seems that they have <https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Reference/...> set to "origin", meaning it says that the request came from duckduckgo.com but nothing further
But, to answer your question, presumably a search engine that wanted to stay really under the radar could use that same mechanism to choose "no-referrer" and the traffic would seem organic(I also had a good chuckle at them choosing to break the typo chain with this directive)