> 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/?redir=1

That page basically confirms this. It says

> To do that, we've developed an open source Instant Answer platform called DuckDuckHack,

which links to https://duckduckhack.com/ which says "DuckDuckHack is now in Maintenance Mode".

And the "four hundred sources" link links to 400 special case replies. They are probably useful, but fire rarely. It's basically Bing, and that page is a bunch of spin.

Yeah, it's interesting to do comparison searches between ddg and bing. On a few random searches I found I got identical top results - things start to differentiate after the first four or five.

So it's like a metasearch engine which also includes crawling of their own. Similar to dogpile[0],

> Powered by Metasearch technology, Dogpile returns all the best results from leading search engines including Google and Yahoo!, so you find what you’re looking for faster. [1]

[0] - https://www.dogpile.com

[1] - https://www.dogpile.com/support/aboutus

As far as I know they don't do any crawling on their own. It's also not meta: it's just bing and some special cases.

I was about to be like "ummmm no, that's silly"...

Then I looked it up(using Google - haha)

Well I'll be dammed, DDG does use Bing. Wow.