> and now DDG is still a fringe of the market even in our increasingly privacy-conscious, big-tech-company-skeptical times

Is it, though? I mean, yeah, it's no Google or Bing or Yahoo, but it also doesn't have Google or Microsoft or Yahoo money, either.

It's on the brink of breaking 1% in the US [1]; that might seem small, but that'd be a good 33% of ChromeOS users or 10% of macOS users. Not bad, considering.

And really, blaming DuckDuckGo's branding for its poor marketshare is pretty ridiculous given the competition. I mean come on, what kind of a name is "Google"? Or "Bing"? Or "Yahoo"? The ridiculousness of the branding doesn't seem to actually be a problem, since that's actually constant across all of the top four browsers in the US.

[1]: http://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share/all/uni...

[2]: http://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/all/united-states-...

I would propose that bad branding is a symptom of a deeper problem, that the services were designed by engineers motivated primarily by ideology, which is very unlikely to reach a wide audience outside of engineers and activists

On the other hand, they've been profitable since at least 2015 without invasive tracking. They have a lock on their niche in the marketplace, and their Alexa rank is in the top 200 and rising. Their main competitors are two of the biggest companies in the world, yet they are growing and showing no signs of slowing down. I'd call that a success.

Search engines are a mature market. You're not going to displace Google unless you manage to disrupt the entire industry somehow; social tried and failed at this, so it's not clear what this would even mean at present.

As a challenger in a mature market, DDG has the right strategy, and they are playing their hand successfully. I seriously doubt that branding is holding them back.