I believe I've seen DDG's CEO or founder on here claiming that they do not proxy requests through Bing and that they do their own indexing. I think they had been using Bing at some point but I'm pretty sure current DDG results is all DDG indexing. Probably still falling for most of the same tricks which blogspammers use for Google SEO, though.
> To deliver Instant Answers on specific topics, DuckDuckGo leverages many sources, including specialized sources like Sportradar and crowd-sourced sites like Wikipedia.
> We also maintain our own crawler (DuckDuckBot) and many indexes to support our results.
> we have more traditional links and images in our search results too, which we largely source from Bing.
I was responding to someone who said DDG is “just a proxy for Bing”. Not that the things in on that page aren’t true but I fail to see how that makes it a proxy; “proxy” suggests that the query actually goes through Bing servers. Sourcing from a service is not the same as proxying through it.