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by kucing 2343 days ago
Can I get a reference to this? :)
1 comments

https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/so...

> We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we also source from a variety of partners, including Verizon Media (formerly Yahoo) and Bing.

> In fact, DuckDuckGo gets its results from over four hundred sources. These include hundreds of vertical sources delivering niche Instant Answers, DuckDuckBot (our crawler) and crowd-sourced sites (like Wikipedia, stored in our answer indexes). We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we also source from a variety of partners, including Verizon Media (formerly Yahoo) and Bing.

Hmm I think the Bing is overemphasized if we say that "DuckDuckGo uses Bing underneath so the company whom you should really be complaining to is MSFT."

CMIIW!

The explanation is fluff and has no meaning if they don't give which percentage of queries is answered by which source. e.g. it is probably all bing for any non trivial query. To me, it seems they just want to create an illusion that it is more than a glorified proxy / meta search engine.
Yet, an anonymising proxy with added functionality is valuable to some people, believe it or not!

It’s like saying “google just wants to create the illusion that they are more than a glorified frontend for a big iterative eigenvector solver”.

I doubt this because DDG usually gives me very different results from ecosia, an actual Bing proxy.
They probably do a different ranking on the bing index, not directly proxying. If you try non trivial searches, you can see that ddg does not have a different result than bing, only order and representation differs.
Try various "what is my ip" queries and you will see that the cached IP on results which show it in the snippet is the same on DDG and Bing (and Ecosia), while different on Google.
I believe it's only Bing and yandex for web, and other sources for the other things, but I don't have a source right now.