This is all that matters. For most users, privacy is simply less important than the quality of search results. DDG is toast unless they can figure out how to match or beat the quality of Google's results with 1/100th of Google's engineering capacity. They've been around for over 10 years and haven't really made much of a dent, so I don't see it happening.
> In fact, DuckDuckGo gets its results from over four hundred sources. These include hundreds of vertical sources delivering niche Instant Answers, DuckDuckBot (our crawler) and crowd-sourced sites (like Wikipedia, stored in our answer indexes). We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we also source from a variety of partners, including Verizon Media (formerly Yahoo) and Bing.
And the "four hundred sources" link links to 400 special case replies. They are probably useful, but fire rarely. It's basically Bing, and that page is a bunch of spin.
Yeah, it's interesting to do comparison searches between ddg and bing. On a few random searches I found I got identical top results - things start to differentiate after the first four or five.
So it's like a metasearch engine which also includes crawling of their own. Similar to dogpile[0],
> Powered by Metasearch technology, Dogpile returns all the best results from leading search engines including Google and Yahoo!, so you find what you’re looking for faster. [1]
