In my opinion Autocompletion / Autosuggestions is one very important feature.
http://nfriedly.com/stuff/duckduckgoogle/ offers this for DDG via Google. This question is: Is Google storing the information that is typed in there? If so, that would make the privacy efforts of DDG useless..
DuckDuckGo doesn't have any paid employees at the moment (aside from Yegg), but they do get a lot of help from volunteers. (like right here on Duck.co!)