Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by pb7 2157 days ago
No, this answer is tired and inaccurate. They successfully fool you into thinking they are much more complex than they really are. They use Bing and Bing alone for the SERP links (without this, you don’t have a search engine) and their crawlers fill in the handful of “onebox” results for certain queries. They keep changing this statement but it used to say “multiple sources like Bing, Yahoo, Oath”... all of which are just Bing. It’s Bing with a couple of add-ons. If Bing were to go away tomorrow, your beloved DDG would be done.
3 comments

I don't think DDG is quite as simple as a wrapper on Bing, just open both in private windows. Same search => different results.

The reason to use DDG isn't that its results are superior to Google/Bing (although imo this is true in many cases), the reason to use DDG is that its so clean. Google and Bing just feel spammy/garish in comparison

Only used for Instant Answers and widgets, as confirmed by your quote. All the actual search results are basically all Bing, again confirmed by the same quote from DDG themselves.
Do you have a source for this?
The source is right above. Have you clicked on the link? They don't exactly hide the truth. If you click the link to their "400 sources", you'll be taken to a page that lists all of their "Instant Answers" sources only which supports their goal of providing information without leaving DDG. Interestingly, Google gets a lot of shit for scraping results from websites and not giving them the direct traffic, even in this very thread, but I guess we have lower expectations for a search engine that's 99% Bing.