I hope DuckDuckGo gets a lot better really soon. Things like this and the AMP debacle make me more and more distrusting of search results. Unfortunately, Google is still so much faster and more relevant than DDG.
That's highly unlikely. You need a huge money to build and operate the search engine comparable to Google. There is another route though - to build something like Blekko engine, but it requires a big amount of help from the users.
Considering that Blekko was, ultimately, shut down, users may be less inclined to contribute to something similar in the future, assuming they remember.