Because they don't make any money, because only the sorts of shitty practises people often complain about are what enables making money providing free services.
If enough people were actually willing to pay to use a search engine you could have an awesome search engine with none of that.
DDG is excellent most of the time, but way behind when doing video or map searches. I have it as my default in most places, but sometimes I just have to fall back to Google.
Agreed. Additionally, DDG is useless when searching for current news events. Google is great at flowing in headlines for recent events with searches, which often leads me to include the "!g" bang if searching for a recent issue/store.
Yup. The bang feature makes DDG amazing. I use it as my default because it's a great way to quickly do tailored searches. It's very easy to say, search Hacker News (!hn), python documentation (!py3), R sites (!rseek) or just pull up a wikipedia page (!w).
I wish that were true. I tried to switch to them after they did their 'next' a few months back but the results were most of the time not nearly as good as Google's for my queries and I had to switch back.
