If it helps, I was just as surprised by the results at the time. ;-) DuckDuckGo is working at a significant disadvantage as compared to Google. For starters, t

If it helps, I was just as surprised by the results at the time. ;-) DuckDuckGo is working at a significant disadvantage as compared to Google. For starters, they have significantly smaller market share. This is no longer like the days of yore when the market was much more fragmented. Google's market share is roughly 18x larger than DDG's. That means they get far less behavioural data to inform their ranking algorithm. That also dramatically impacts the amount of revenue they can feed in to the engine (and the impact isn't linear, as I mentioned elsewhere). Then add on that their privacy efforts mean they are deliberately blinding themselves to much of the data that can be used to tune a search engine. It'd be amazing if their result quality was better. Again, it wasn't an illusion that Google's search results were better, particularly whenever people switched (which mostly happened long before Google gained a dominant market share). I would argue that even with comparable technology, today Google has an overwhelming advantage over competitors. I'd be surprised if it weren't absolutely the best at least amongst any of the alternatives that most people would even consider. That's just not how they got most of their market share. The illusion is that technical advantages were the primary driver of Google's success in the search engine market, and that Google has consistently been the best search engine in the market. The former is just clearly not true (the AOL deal alone helped them way more than any subsequent technical innovations), and the latter flies against the evidence that at the very least during height of the search engine wars, result relevance was very competitive.