> Privacy is probably slowly growing into a big deal in the minds of regular people, but when the incumbent works, and works better (in my experience Google does just return better results than DDG - and I really did give it a try, in earnest, for a solid week a few months back...), privacy alone isn't going to be enough at this point.

I've had the opposite experience lately, DDG has been almost identical to the google results, to the point where the seem to be calibrating there own searches with google. Unfortunately it means it also suffers the same problems.