That's a fair characterization. I think DDG is almost the nostalgia play. What's the David Byrne lyric? You got what you wanted, but you lost what you had.
Good point. Also their main focus seems to be privacy, not quality.
The privacy problems of Google just recently (i.e. last 5 years) started to bother me, their complete inability to fix their broken search operators has bothered me for a decade.
My guess is if DDG provided the same quality as the old Google instead of just this nostalgia play it could possibly rise even faster.
