The article is unfair in its descriptions of DuckDuckGo's search quality. I tried the same searches that are mentioned in the article, namely "best beach Sydney" and "Australia leader". The results were fine. The former returned a list of Sydney beaches plus some reviews, and the latter returned results for the Australian prime minister. Perfect. OK, the ads were off-topic but who cares?
Personally, I switched to DuckDuckGo from Google about 6 months ago and I have never looked back. Its quality is great IMO.