I'm getting Google in 0.5-3 secounds, DuckDuckGo in 3-4 secounds, StartPage in 2 secounds. USA 4G 3:30AM
On another note, both Google and DuckDuckGo seem to link directly to search results but actually redirect your broswer to capture the link you clicked. StartPage links directly to search results.
I've asked DuckDuckGo about this and they can't provide a sastifactory answer. Maybe someone could clue me in why that redirect is nessicary, but until then I consider them untrustworthy.
The click redirects are to stop the subsequent website from seeing a user's search terms, but we only use it for browsers that don't support meta referrer. Even then, we obviously don't collect or share anything via the redirect server, in line with our privacy policy ( https://duckduckgo.com/privacy ). There's a bit more about the redirects here: https://duck.co/help/results/rduckduckgocom
Also, it's possible to disable them completely here: http://duckduckgo.com/settings#privacy
Disclaimer: DuckDuckGo staff
That said, it may still be some difference like browser caching, or maybe android even does that. My tests were on a Windows PC using chrome.
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.
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.
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.
That's btw Google's trick, from the very beginning. It was not pagerank or any better algorithms, it was purely massive investments getting into all the data centers worldwide.
If you're looking for an alternative to Google that is faster than duckduckgo, try Bing. It is still slow, but faster than duckduckgo.
DDG: 4-5 seconds.
Google search: 1-2 seconds.
Carrier - Airtel (4G) in India.
