I wonder how much of this increase is people using bang commands to search other sites using DDG (where DDG just redirects the search to the destination site, like how the Firefox search bar has the option of searching on other sites, but with additional network trips). Whenever I have to use a non-Firefox browser that doesn’t have a separate search bar (with configurable search engines), I use bang commands to get to Wikipedia or IMDB, for example. I also use !s (for Startpage) and !g (for Google) when the DDG results aren’t satisfactory.

DDG is still not a perfect replacement for Google for me, but it is a replacement most of the time, and it is my default search engine on browsers I use.

One feature I don’t have on DDG after all these years is limiting the search results to the past year. I go to Startpage whenever I need that.