I think a secondary issue Duckduckgo and other competitors have to contend with is the idea that nothing other than Google is worth the time of day. I know every thread on HN has people queuing up to say how DDG results aren't as good as Google results (or to say how they switched a while ago and DDG is good enough for their needs), but from a user perspective we can see a much more level playing field in Google vs DDG et al (2020) as opposed to Google vs Altavista et al (1998).