For the HN crowd, this may be an option. The general public doesn't really care about privacy, and is not going to use DuckDuckGo or any other service whose primary selling point is privacy. The best search engine will win the market, and the best search engine will tend to be the one that can generate the most money to invest in its service.

Even if someone comes in and beats Google at some point, they will do it by hiring a massive number of talented people and buying large quantities of data centers and servers. Those things can only be paid for through advertising and tracking, as few people will directly pay for search services. I suppose a socialist/communist government somewhere in the world might have the resources to build a search engine of Google quality that doesn't rely on advertising, but they would have their own hostile agenda - that would be far worse than having to put up with Nike trying to sell you some shoes while you search.