Speaking of “any little differentiator“, Nicholas Deleon wrote a short profile about DuckDuckGo for The Daily:

[Gabriel Weinberg] designed DuckDuckGo to address some of the concerns that people have had with Google and other search engines over the years. “We try to focus on things that the big guys don’t do for a variety of reasons,” he said. “Usually those reasons aren’t technical, but rather business, legal, and cultural. It’s somewhat silly trying to compete with Google on a technical basis.”

“The Apple of Search Engines”