> it would be wrong to say "Google does similar things"
This does not follow.
It also isn't what I was suggesting, but it would surprise me if Google didn't look at what Bing and Yahoo were doing (and DDG).
As of October 2019, Yahoo! Search is once again “powered by Bing”[2].
To me, results are as crap as Bing's.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/duckduckgo/comments/6uaibg/comment/...
SO and the other 400 sources are only used for instant boxes and other widgets. The real organic search results are all from Bing.
> In fact, DuckDuckGo gets its results from over four hundred sources. These include hundreds of vertical sources delivering niche Instant Answers, DuckDuckBot (our crawler) and crowd-sourced sites (like Wikipedia, stored in our answer indexes). 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.
I'm not sure where you're getting
> The real organic search results are all from Bing.
That paragraph __DOES NOT__ say that
> more traditional links in the search results
It's super obvious to me what that refers to - the actual search results. The rest is just fluff.
> In fact, DuckDuckGo gets its results from over four hundred sources. These include hundreds of vertical sources delivering niche Instant Answers, DuckDuckBot (our crawler) and crowd-sourced sites (like Wikipedia, stored in our answer indexes). 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.
https://help.duckduckgo.com/results/sources/
The results are very similar but not identical to using yahoo or bing.
It's not mentioned on their site, or their wikipedia entry, or anywhere else I could find, and the results were different when I tried a few searches in them both just now.
Are they "Using Bing" in the same sense they "Use Wikipedia" to put info boxes on the results page sometimes?