This increase in traffic are not being seen in the unique visitor counts measured by Compete ( https://siteanalytics.compete.com/duckduckgo.com/ ). It appears as if a loyal core of duckduckgo users are switching to it entirely. Alternatively, duckduckgo users are not tracked by Compete, which is entire possible since I believe Compete gets their data from browser extensions that don't respect privacy. Note, Compete d…
I soft-switched a month or two ago and in the beginning was adding !g to pretty much every query out of habit. Over the last week however I decided to poke around more (checking out the other ! tags, understanding what sorts of special queries would get answers) and have only asked for Google results once since to compare with DDG. Google's presentation is still much better (i.e. if I type in Yankees on Google I get a fully styled box score and schedule... with DDG I get some Wikipedia suggestions and a small blurb from MLB/ESPN news underneath.) but for web results I haven't been too disappointed. It's far less frustrating than I remember it being for regular use, so it wouldn't surprise me at all if recent events have prompted more casual users to commit to it.
Edit: For a good example of its biases, search "hacker news" on ddg, bing, then google.