On the other hand, that is not the criteria for them to be successful, because they are already better on a different metric: Privacy.
I find that 90% of my queries are just "who is that person?" or "what is that thing?". Those queries can be answered by DDG just as well as Google. So I'm not giving up anything, but gaining privacy. More importantly, I'm (subtly) sending a signal to the market that I find privacy is important.
Even on the 10% of queries that are complex, DDG does "good enough". I sometimes wonder if Google has the results sorted better, but I'll gladly waste a few minutes here and there in exchange for privacy.
You could do both privacy and good search results without using DDG: startpage.com
You can also have at least as good privacy (better in my opinion) and better search results (again, in my opinion) with other search engines: qwant.com
What is it those two examples doesn't have that DDG does have? The evangelist feel of DDG really turns me off and I'm sure it scares many off from ever looking at it. It is a bit like listening to Apple fans talking about Steve 'The Juice' Jobs.
Sure Google had a vastly superior algorithm but I don't think too many people really grasped that at the time.
That's why I used Altavista before that. Google kept things very simple while other sites loaded on the bloat and garbage.
I don't remember ever feeling like what I found with Google couldn't be found with Altavista or lycos. But a lot of the other companies tried to prematurely monetize to an excessive degree.
I think the difference in algorithms matters even less now, and that google’s modern advantage is not in ranking algorithms but in automated display of structured data, like sports league results, filmography for an actor, etc., and work around knowledge graph methods to automate that stuff.
Early google was unequivocally only differentiated by branding and sparse design.
It wasn't just the simplicity. Google was also a lot faster, and had no ads!
How ironic that advertisement later became their bread and butter.
I think the vast majority of users don't consciously evaluate search engines for accuracy. And most non-technical users just assume that if they cant find it through X, its probably not there.
Google invested in the fundamental from the start and they pushed the limit of what search engines can do.
When I was in my first role as an IT manager, I set the policy that all machines had their default page set to google.com away from Yahoo, because yahoo was an ugly mess.
Google was clean and simple. This was the only reason. I made the edict to set it to google and so some people said "you should go work for google since you like them so much" - man I wish I had tried to do so then.
And this was in 1998 or so...
The main reason? "And" searches. Brilliant.
Then Google showed up, and Google had PageRank. Boom, the top result for any simple query was what you wanted.
I don’t see why I should sacrifice my privacy for google to provide me with a single interface for these few sites, especially when DDG does it without mining all my info.
I don't see them truly competing with big budget search engines, but it's probably easy enough to make decent money from keyword ads and if you can sell the brand, you can get enough users to cover a smaller machine footprint and R&D budget that's orders of magnitude smaller.
The results are probably not awful (I don't use it). Result quality gets exponentially more difficult as you try to push that boundary, so you can probably get 80% of the quality there with 1% of the investment. The results may be good enough for plenty of folks, but I highly doubt they will ever be better than the big budget search engines.