> "
a) DDG needs about 1/1000th the revenue of Google to survive at its current scale."
I don't think evil or benevolence needs a threshold. Size of the company is absolutely irrelevant. Marketshare is absolutely irrelevant.
DDG's redeeming quality is that they've focused their entire identity on privacy. Should they fail at privacy, then a lot of their users will bail. On the other hand it's not like some open source app or distributed protocol that users can inspect. It's still proprietary technology using a centralized model and you have to trust their word for it.
And in fact, for me their small size is actually a red flag. This is because big companies are also big targets for law enforcement. The EU has been historically trigger happy when applying fines to big companies, since it provides a valuable source of income (I imagine). Google is in fact under a lot more scrutiny than DuckDuckGo or other smaller companies.
And you can see this for example when interacting with Google's platforms, Adwords / AdSense, versus other smaller players in the "real time bidding" space. Google exposes a lot less about the user's profile, they leak a lot less, leaving a lot less opportunity for building your own user profiles.
They have also been transparent with their users about what they collect, even before the GDPR forced companies in the EU to be transparent. You can also opt out of logging app activity and profiling. Or more recently you could opt for a deletion of your history every 3 months.
Of course, you could say that you don't trust Google to do that. That's fine. But why do you trust DuckDuckGo then? They survive, after all, with the same business model. They say they don't give out your searches and info to Bing Ads, but you basically have to trust their word for it.
And given Google's history, how seriously they've handled security, plus they've always projected a certain maturity in handling user data (compared with Facebook), it seems to me that we are in conspiracy theories land. I was a DDG user, but seeing anti-vaxxers in the news recently led me to the conclusion that on the topic of privacy, my views are not evidence based. And I'm going to guess that a lot of other privacy conscious people did fall into the same trap as I did.
Going forward, for me there's only one way to ensure privacy and that is via technology (end to end encryption, open source, etc). And if I have to trust service and app vendors, I first need to identify my threats. Whom am I afraid of? What am I protecting against? Yes, I still fear Google, but now that fear is very contextual and task driven.
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> "c) Unsurprisingly, I find DDG's search results good enough. I rarely go to Google, and only when DDG fails me."
DDG fails horribly for me on two kinds of searches:
1. local searches — it's completely useless for local searches — imagine that I'm in Romania and if I want Romanian results for "restaurants", DDG gives me results in Spanish, from freaking Spain
2. software development searches — I would have expected DDG to be better, with their integration with GitHub and StackOverflow but isn't. It's actually really really bad, many times completely ignoring my words, giving me results for words I did not type, so there's this annoying back and forth where I try refining my searches with extra words and syntax, to force it to search what I want; this rarely happens with Google and when it does, it's because there are no results available
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That said, I would like for DuckDuckGo to improve and I am glad to see them doing well, because I'm a firm believer in competition. I would not like for Google to remain the sole option available.
On the other hand I really hope they divorce themselves from Bing. If Bing goes offline, or if Microsoft closes their API, it might kill DuckDuckGo. They do have integrations with other sources and their own partial index, but AFAIK Bing is their main source, which makes them effectively a Bing shell.
This is also why your operating costs are misleading. Because it's not an apples to apples comparison. Maintaining your own web index, apparently, is not that cheap. If it were, they wouldn't be using Bing.