I find their results to be better than Google’s. With google, you need to scroll past ads, then the garbage they pull from RDF triples (the boxes with facts, logos, etc), related searches, news, etc, etc and then you get the results.

With Duck Duck Go, there’s much less stuff to scroll past to get the results.

Test query: Samsung Galaxy

Google has 3.5 cell phone screens of header to scroll through. DDG has two screens, then the results, then the remaining screen or so of stuff google jams in the header.

This is much better.

For instance, the list of suggested searches is after the search results. Why does Google think I want to refine my search or switch to a different Google product before I read the results my first attempt at searching yielded?!? Do search logs show that most searches are from people that are typing things they don’t care about into the incorrect website?

Ignoring that, let’s quantify the results by position on the page. DDG has the top result in position 4 (samsung) or 6 (wikipedia).

Google has the first two hits at positions 16 and 27. (And stutters a lot of similar looking Samsung pages for some reason.)

I’m counting horizontal rows of content, skipping headers and columns of additional content.

(Edit: typos)

That's a fair characterization. I think DDG is almost the nostalgia play. What's the David Byrne lyric? You got what you wanted, but you lost what you had.

> I think DDG is almost the nostalgia play.

Good point. Also their main focus seems to be privacy, not quality.

The privacy problems of Google just recently (i.e. last 5 years) started to bother me, their complete inability to fix their broken search operators has bothered me for a decade.

My guess is if DDG provided the same quality as the old Google instead of just this nostalgia play it could possibly rise even faster.