divyamistry

Not doubting these points, but you should always cite peer-reviewed or otherwise verified sources. It makes all the difference between a fact and an opinion. This is especially true when contradicting a widely held belief. Without a verifiable source, these are just "interesting hypotheses".

I think it's utilized more than we might think. DDG put up pretty big bill-boards around a lot of small and large cities. I believe those were mostly around "tech-forward cities" because it might be an easier crowd to get under the fold. They have a neat stats page where they track site traffic. https://duckduckgo.com/traffic It certainly looks promising. I've switched to ddg as my primary search, and I regularly do find queries that goog answers better. My partner often uses one of my devices and they have not complained about not being able to find what they were looking for.

There's certainly power of default at play where people just don't want something seemingly unfamiliar, but there's also plenty of queries that the big G answers without a sweat that DDG just can't seem to gather info on.

Anyways, that's a long winded way of saying that yea, I think a respectable number of "real world" people use dduckgo.