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I would agree with this if not for my recent experience with duckduckgo. While Google's search result quality has sharply deteriorated in recent months, duckduckgo's results have stayed flat for the most part, to the point where ddg's result quality is more often superior to Google. If it were a matter of SEO manipulation, wouldn't ddg's quality decline too?

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Duckduckgo has an inherent advantage- nobody cares

They have a tiny percentage of the market, so there will be a tiny percentage of money invested in gaming their algorithms.

And also, why doesn't DDG grow in market share if Google's results are worse?

My hypothesis is that Google's results aren't bad - they are actually serving a set of results which satisfies the laymen, and it's only the technical, highly niche users with whom the results don't align.

DDG is growing exponentially, Google is just massive and it takes a while to grow big enough to notice https://duckduckgo.com/traffic

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