[bradknowles]

You could try doing a traceroute from your mobile phone to both Google and DDG.

The number of hops and latency you see in traceroute may help you figure out what kind of CDN and global server load balancing that DDG is doing versus what Google is doing, and thus why their respective web pages are the speeds they are.

[bradknowles]

If you go to gmetrix.com and generate page speed reports for both Google and DDG, you will see some interesting differences.

Of biggest importance to the OP is that DDG doesn't appear to be using any kind of CDN.

For DDG, their web page is the same size (384 KB), and the score pretty well on most subjects, except they don't defer parsing of Javascript (noted on the first tab of the Page Speed report), and on the second tab of the page speed report, you will note they don't use a CDN and they don't have "Expires" headers.

But for someone on a mobile device in a country that might have slow connectivity to the main web site for DDG, I think the lack of the CDN is probably the biggest factor.

[bradknowles]

I did try to see if I could generate some quick graphs with pingdom.com or runscope.com to highlight the importance of using a CDN, when sampled from various places around the world.

Sadly, while both pingdom and runscope do allow me to test sites and get HTTPS latency data on a per test basis, they don't make it easy to collect and graph that data -- on a per test basis. Sure, they can both give you uptime reports and tell you average response time across all tests, but I want more detail than that.

Still working on this.