This comment is made a lot but it's only half true. DDG does use Bing to source some of it's results but it does have it's own crawlers too. In practice this means that it isn't "effectively a UI over Bing".

Here's an old but interesting SO post that if true would indicate otherwise https://stackoverflow.com/a/24089393

Seems people can't find your source, so I did some digging and found this:

"We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we also source from a variety of partners, including Verizon Media (formerly Yahoo) and Bing."[0]

[0]https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/so...

But what percentage of it comes from which partner? They never say this.

And more importantly, what percentage does not come from any partner.

...so the order of results is still determined by DDG, right?

As siblings have covered - it is a proxy for some search results.

That's ok though - a privacy respecting proxy to a decent search engine is a useful thing. You get all the search results and they don't get to track you.

Your claim desperately needs a citation.

Logic. Creating and maintaining a half decent search engine requires a billion dollar worth of infrastructure and talent. They have neither.

That's circular. They don't have it because they could not?

Alas, it's using bing as one source, it's more than just a proxy to bing. And they seem to have their own crawler as well.

I don't think I've ever seen DDG show up in my logs, and I found this article from a web host that listed out their top crawler traffic and DDG doesn't even register (but something called Sogou is): https://deviceatlas.com/blog/most-active-bots-and-crawlers-w...

It might be that DDG sticks to the to X thousand sites or something like that, so I would imagine that Bing must be providing the majority of the index, but maybe not for more popular queries.

Where did you find information it is really a "proxy" to Bing? I couldn't find such information.

BTW, there is also similar private search that proxies queries to google - https://www.startpage.com/

From two days ago: Startpage is now owned by an advertising company https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/di5rn3/startpage_i... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21371577

They also use Yandex, I don't see the problem exactly.

> Is there any search engine which is NOT backed by an extremely heavyweight player?

Global search of most web pages worth finding is a heavyweight task.

Are you sure you are not confusing DDG with Ecosia? Ecosia is also an UI to Bing.

My guess is DDG mostly depends on bing technology, at least for anything that is non trivial. There is a lot of smoke and mirrors on what actually DDG is, i would be happy to learn about details of their deals, technology, etc.

A service that combined yandex and google would probably cancel out most of the worlds censorship. I'm not sure where you would be allowed to run such a service from though...

In Russia DDG uses Yandex

in Soviet Union...?

...DuckDuckGo searches you?