The excessive certainly combined with ellipses was meant to imply irony.
Essay Time. But DDG + NSA is interesting. Google was attractive to users because it gave them what they wanted - instead of the busy "portals" and paid placement. It was fast, honest, clear and had a better ranking algorithm.
Today, people don't want to be tracked/monitored, and unfortunately that is key to Google's business model. They were right to aggressively try to head off facebook, but wrong to abuse users to do it. They are definitely "evil" (their "don't be evil" meant don't be like microsoft or IBM, who pushed users around as it suited. Arguably, a publically traded corp is legally obliged to put profit above people - ie be "evil"; but it is possible to serve both, as google once did).
So, DDG is giving users what they want, and out-googling google, in a specific sense.
It's been said it's difficult to create sustainable competitive advantage in search, because users can trivially switch. But one thing google has been great at is fast response times. Users really care about this, and because it's so expensive to build huge server farms all over the world, this aspect is a SCA. DDG is far slower than google; and google suggest often feels local to me. Perhaps this could be replicated with AWS, but DDG hasn't done it.
But I think you're right: previously DDG was a niche success. But with the change in what users want (because of NSA/snowden revelations, and likely there'll be others), that is absolutely inconsistent with Google's business model for ads, then DDG really could overthrow them. But DDG make enough money to afford comparable server-farm investment? (Still, that gets cheaper all the time...)
Google could of course go back to being purely about search, and not acquire user data so aggressively... but giving up user modeling would massively undermine their ad profits, and they are now slaves to Wall Street.