How is DDG not an advertising company already? One of the top hit on every search I do on DDG is an ad (actually in my testing I found if I do an informational search like "Barack Obama" I get an ad on DDG and none on Google). If advertising itself is the problem, DDG has already doomed itself.
You're right of course about DDG selling advertising — I assume at much lower cost than Google given their relative inability to gather intelligence about users. The big question is whether they have a non-evil business model on the horizon (sponsored links aren't bad of themselves, but they are the entrance to the rabbit hole Google has long since gone down and expanded into a giant underground complex).
