[mda]

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.

[FabHK]

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”.

[soraminazuki]

I doubt this because DDG usually gives me very different results from ecosia, an actual Bing proxy.

[mda]

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.

[Kiro]

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.