I agree. DDG's index is 1% the size of Google's, and after a few queries, I quickly go back to Google. I highly doubt their small index is b/c of quality reasons - they probably can't scale as much as they want, but in the end, that's 99% of the product.
The cool syntax, privacy, UX, etc makes up 1%, and can never make up for the lack of quality results (compared to Google)
In the end, it's still too early to judge them as a failure or success, they need 4-5 more years. But as it is right now, they are nowhere close to being remotely popular. The number of queries per day is a very misleading stat. That's now what's important - it's the number of unique visitors. You can have 10 people that make up a million queries, yet I doubt advertisers will be clamoring to advertise to those 10 users. Search is a product where it's pretty much 1-2 winners take all. Yahoo has 10% of the search engine market share, but has .01% of the advertising share. It's not 1:1
The cool syntax, privacy, UX, etc makes up 1%, and can never make up for the lack of quality results (compared to Google)
In the end, it's still too early to judge them as a failure or success, they need 4-5 more years. But as it is right now, they are nowhere close to being remotely popular. The number of queries per day is a very misleading stat. That's now what's important - it's the number of unique visitors. You can have 10 people that make up a million queries, yet I doubt advertisers will be clamoring to advertise to those 10 users. Search is a product where it's pretty much 1-2 winners take all. Yahoo has 10% of the search engine market share, but has .01% of the advertising share. It's not 1:1