Google has put so much effort into speed over the last 10 years that they can't perceptively improve much in this department going forward. So DDG's target is relatively stationary and closing the gap may be expensive but is at least straightforward.
Well, it's only stationary if Google's features are stationary too. e.g. when they introduced live search, that's a new performance target any competitor has to reach.
That's a good point, though I'm afraid it might be one of those things where diminishing returns mean that it becomes very very expensive to catch up, and I don't know if DDG has the resources. Moore's Law should help, though, but personally I haven't really felt (subjectively) like DDG has become much faster since I've been using it.
The scale of capital investment needed is really only feasible in the context of an acquisition or maybe a huge DDG boom stemming from a massive Google privacy scandal.
Probably. But just adding autocomplete and improving speed some (doesn't need to be quite google-equivalent) would go a long way towards making the experience subjectively better.
Another thing that annoys me is that they have ads near the top of the results that don't load quite at the same time as the results, so I sometimes am about to click on the top result but an ad pops up and pushes everything down making me miss my click. If they could somehow avoid that happening, it would also make the experience better.
