The reason is Google probably has 100x the money, and 1000x the expertise.

I love DuckDuckGo for their no-following and no-tracking you policy. I admire that and want to support them. But yet, I know that many, many of the queries are usually yield far better results on Google.

I'm just hoping that with time and enough people using DuckDuckGo, it will get a lot better.

I have been using DDG for a long time now and have never had that problem. Except with images. So I still use google for that.:-)

Because they don’t track you so can’t make assumptions about what you want/mean.

Trade offs.

I repeatedly tried "living in another search-engine" for a month at a time. I tried Bing, DDG and Yahoo. If I didn't search for something easy (like "population new york") the results were useless and superficial.

Searching for something like "programatically create credit memo magento" yielded the user documentation on how to create a credit memo while Googles first result was the relevant API page with the second being forum posts explaining how to do what I wanted.

If you need specific results and don't get them, you go back to Google.