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But similarly, one data point that DDG hasn't overtaken Google doesn't mean that tech people's preferences don't influence ordinary people.

I thought it was generally well-accepted that developers mass-moving friends and family off of IE 11 was part of the reason why other browsers ended up beating it.

Similarly, I thought it was mostly accepted that part of the reason so much of the web was optimized for Chrome was because Chrome had genuinely better developer tools, and developers preferred to optimize first in Chrome and second in other browsers.

Maybe there's more disagreement on those points than I realized.

Even on the subject of DuckDuckGo, which is probably not going to be mass-adopted any time soon (if at all), actual usage numbers are increasing faster than any other major search provider, including Google[0]. Whether or not those numbers are coming from ordinary people or tech people, clearly somebody is being convinced to use DDG. Is it going to be a revolution? Probably not. But it's not nothing.

I really wish people would stop defining success as a monopoly. Even in the browser space, the goal isn't to make Chrome vanish. We just want Firefox to have a big enough user-base across enough markets that it can't be ignored. Even 20-30% would probably do it. Mozilla doesn't have to kill Chrome.

Similarly, if every non-tech user keeps searching on Google, and DuckDuckGo just becomes a great search engine that every programmer prefers, that's a pretty big win. I would not call that a loss.

[0]: https://duckduckgo.com/traffic (of course saturation does play a role here)