DDG have done very well with their marketing. It may have a lot to do with them not having to develop a search engine from scratch though, since they use the B

DDG have done very well with their marketing. It may have a lot to do with them not having to develop a search engine from scratch though, since they use the Bing API for their results. Mojeek predates them by some years but does their own crawling/indexing/ranking. Even Ecosia who are essentially identical on the back-end (Bing results) market themselves on planting trees for every search and I see them mentioned a bunch. Interestingly they don't seem to factor in the energy consumed on Bing's side of the search - where the heavy lifting of data is done. Also that US investors have a much bigger risk appetite means the likes of Neeva (who IIRC were also using other's results) can spring into existence and seemingly get a love in from the press because of their big tech connection.