[CurrentB]

DDG has a laughably small market share. This doesn't necessarily make them a non-threat, but it's going to take more than this to change users' search behavior (ie convert them from Google to DDG) on even a minute level. I mean Google has the whole page preview thing now anyway, and the content farm thing should be fixed soon, as mentioned. Honestly, Google Instant is the best thing in search for a long time and it's so ingrained in my expectations now that I couldn't see switching to a search engine without it.

So asking what Google will do isn't really an important question.

[babeKnuth]

their market share may be laughable, but that still doesn't eliminate the fact that many knowledgeable people prefer either blekko or duckduckgo over google.

it can definitely be viewed as a "calm before the storm". or if you're familiar with gentrification, the "cool cats" are living on this side of town.

[chc]

Yes, many knowledgeable people prefer Blekko or DuckDuckGo. But that's "many" in the absolute sense, where "many" people are part of any arbitrary group on a planet of 7 billion.

Relative to the size of the group we're talking about, even among geeks, using DuckDuckGo as your main search engine is rare. It certainly doesn't look like DuckDuckGo has a glut of tech industry leaders using it exclusively — mostly just the odd geek here and there who wants to try something new or who has just decided he doesn't like Google.