No, they use their own crawler for quite some time already. Spiced up with bing results, if I recall it correctly.

I'm pretty sure Bing still makes up a large portion of their results. I remember reading some official stats at some point that their own crawler was such a miniscule part of the results that in effect you were just basically using a more limited version of Bing.

I've been using duckduckgo for several years and unless Bing had radically changed in recent times, I would consider Bing to be the more limited of the two.

I wanted to look up a translation and tried !wr word on bing and it did not load the wordreference.com page for word

I wanted to find a pizza for tonight and I'm not familiar with my current location, so I typed pizza near me in bing and it returned results for pizza chain store in US, Canada and India while I'm in western Europe. Same search in duckduckgo gives me an openstreetmap based map centered on my location with addresses of places to get pizza and yelp reviews.

I could go on for a while with other examples showing that duckduckgo is definitely not a limited version of Bing.

Source?

From 2015, but the answer is from a DDG employee: https://www.quora.com/What-search-algorithm-does-DuckDuckGo-...

Older still (2013), but more detail: http://highscalability.com/blog/2013/1/28/duckduckgo-archite...

Thanks. I would like to see numbers on how many of the search results actually come from their own crawler though. I may be wrong but it feels like most of them come from Bing or Yahoo.

and yandex.

https://duck.co/help/results/sources

> Why would DDG be any better? It's just Bing wrapped in incognito.

Turns out DDG is not "just Bing wrapped in incognito"[1] so you actually answered your own question here. But even if it were, the incognito part is enough to make much much better.

Then again each has his own preferences[2]

[1]: https://duck.co/help/results/sources [2]: https://twitter.com/ganeumann/status/268389572533170176

I think it could be because a lot of people trying to fool (SEO) google search, but not so many are doing it for bing.

That could be the case, yes.

Can you elaborate on that some more? I thought it was a custom Perl application.

> DuckDuckGo emphasizes returning the best results, rather than the most results, and generates those results from over 400 individual sources, including key crowdsourced sites such as Wikipedia, and other search engines like Bing, Yahoo!, Yandex, and Yummly.

So basically they don't have their own crawler but aggregate results, mostly from Bing which is (or was) clear from comparing search results. However, a sibling comment claims they run their own spider now so my info may be outdated (quote from Wikipedia).