Same! I knew about duckduckhack, but that it had been put in "maintenance mode" a couple years ago, but wasn't aware that DDG had started operating their own crawler. It's exciting to see--I'm hopeful they'll be able to leverage it to improve their result quality and capabilities while staying privacy-friendly.

They have been crawling for a while and AFAIK the data is used at their instant answers, not on search results.