DuckDuckGo has had a banner year:

And yet, DuckDuckGo. The privacy-oriented search engine netted more than 35 billion search queries in 2021, a 46.4% jump over 2020 (23.6 billion). That’s big. Even so, the company, which bills itself as the “Internet privacy company,” offering a search engine and other products designed to “empower you to seamlessly take control of your personal information online without any tradeoffs,” remains a rounding error compared to Google in search.

I use it. It’s not as a good a search engine as Google. Or, at least, Google often gets me what I want faster than DuckDuckGo does. To solve that, I use use the feature that allows me to use Google’s search engine through DuckDuckGo: prepend “!Google” to searches. Basically, DuckDuckGo launders my search.

EDITED TO ADD (1/12): I was wrong. DuckDuckGo does not provide privacy protections when searching using Google.