I wonder why they don’t negotiate with Msft to use Bing or even DDG instead. Seems... incredibly odd... to put oneself in a position where a third party is directly antagonizing your users, reducing your user satisfaction and likely dramatically increasing churn, but you can’t do anything about it because that same party is your main source of funding.
(Disclaimer, I work at msft. Nowhere near this though).
The fact that they’re still on google even though google is screwing over their userbase? I don’t use Firefox because of how difficult it makes captcha. There are others like me.
If they are negotiating with other providers, they certainly aren’t doing a very good job of it.
If I recall correctly, the last time I checked Google's support for Mozilla was in the hundreds of millions per year. I would be shocked if DDG could afford even 10% of that, even as an investment they expected to recoup through additional advertising revenue.
(Disclaimer, I work at msft. Nowhere near this though).