Most people are fairly resistant to changing their behaviour because of annoyances. Take broadcast TV for example. From the 50's to the early aughts, TV's only

Most people are fairly resistant to changing their behaviour because of annoyances. Take broadcast TV for example. From the 50's to the early aughts, TV's only competition was theatres, and its in-home convenience let it win that competition handily in terms of the hours people spent watching TV versus going to the theatre. Television providers took full advantage and the percentage of ads by airtime steadily increased. Shows that were designed around commercial breaks in one era had to be cut down in length and have additional breaks added when rerun in later eras. There was no meaningful competition, either from alternative media distributors or between broadcasters to see who could offer more actual content per hour. It wasn't until streaming came along that cable TV finally started dying. This isn't a huge issue for cable companies, since most have pivoted into operating as ISP's and streaming itself. It's only a matter of time before cable TV is no longer offered as a service by the companies created to offer it. Google's search engine has few competitors. Even the search function on many websites is inferior to a google search restricted to that site. The ads in google search results can be scrolled through in seconds, although Google constantly plays games to make it harder to tell where the ads stop. Their search algorithm is now suspicious in how it sorts the non-ad results of many searches. All of this is annoying to users, but is it annoying enough to force users onto other search engines? Google appears to be determined to find out just how much spam is too much. Will DuckDuckGo or other alternatives to google gain traction as a result of this? Probably some, but probably not much. They likely won't make much of a dent in Google's bottom line until they offer something compellingly superior to Google, just as streaming is superior to broadcast TV.