I would guess more of Google's landing page is cached, and it's a smaller page. I'm getting Google in 0.5-3 secounds, DuckDuckGo in 3-4 secounds, StartPage in 2 secounds. USA 4G 3:30AM On another note, both Google and DuckDuckGo seem to link directly to search results but actually redirect your broswer to capture the link you clicked. StartPage links directly to search results. I've asked DuckDuckGo about this and th…
The click redirects are to stop the subsequent website from seeing a user's search terms, but we only use it for browsers that don't support meta referrer. Even then, we obviously don't collect or share anything via the redirect server, in line with our privacy policy ( https://duckduckgo.com/privacy ). There's a bit more about the redirects here: https://duck.co/help/results/rduckduckgocom
Also, it's possible to disable them completely here: http://duckduckgo.com/settings#privacy
Disclaimer: DuckDuckGo staff