[thewebcount]

> The question is whether DDG would be able to operate if Bing were to shut DDG down tomorrow.

No, that doesn't appear to be the question at all. The original post appears to be an attempt to smear DDG by posting misleading information that you know will confuse users into thinking that their search engine sends PII to Microsoft when you know it doesn't. The original tweet doesn't appear to mention Bing shutting down at all. Here's the entirety of the tweet:

"This is shocking. DuckDuckGo has a search deal with Microsoft which prevents them from blocking MS trackers. And they can't talk about it! This is why privacy products that are beholden to giant corporations can never deliver true privacy; the business model just doesn't work."

I see nothing in there questioning whether DuckDuckGo will still be around if Bing goes under. I also see nothing in yegg's response above that has anything to do with this irrelevant question you mention.

[solso]

There is plenty of comments discussing on the provenance of DDG results, including from Gabriel himself, which is the one we both have participated in,

"it is misleading to say our results just come from Bing."

Discussing how many sources can one bring together it's a distraction to not discuss the degree of dependency between DDG and Bing. More-so when claiming that others suffer from the same, which is factually incorrect for Brave search.