You can’t fight Google on search performance. But someone is fighting them on another meaning.
People use Google because they want good search results.
People use Duckduckgo because they want good search results, and keep their data private. Duckduckgo has changed the meaning of search. It’s about privacy and trust, not just good results.
As Fred Wilson points out, DuckDuckGo has grown 200x in 6 years in terms of direct queries:
Not everyone saw this coming, and well, that’s why good VCs are good VCs. They saw this potential. They bet on this evolution of meaning.