If all the users go to DDG.com, it won't matter if Bing has a great backend or not.
I've recently lived this experience in another context. We built a great backend for a partner that was good at publicity. When they redirected users to their internal backend, we were dead in the water. It didn't matter that the partner struggled with their backend and ours was better. We hadn't invested resources in independent publicity, so users couldn't find us. It was a hard lesson to learn.
People in tech circles always say DDG has a crawler. I know they do. No one ever says how big it is. I have a hard time believing it’s crawling more than a couple percent what Bing is crawling.
One complicating matter is that it specializes in DDG's "Instant Answers"; apparently¹ the "source from other search engines" approach really only applies to the traditional results list, while DuckDuckBot is focused specifically on the Instant Answers, effectively optimizing for the absolute most relevant first result possible. So in its current state DuckDuckBot ain't exactly comparable in purpose.
Still, I don't see much that'd be stopping DDG from ramping this up and having it generate the traditional list of results, too. Yeah, obviously the results for quite a few queries will be far from ideal, but if the query already hits one of DDG's curated data sources, I suspect the results might already be better if anything.
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¹: https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/so...
You think they don't have some tight contractual relationship with built in renewals and extensions? This is really similar to how corporations lock up retail real estate locations. They don't sign a 1 or 2 or even 5 year lease and then hope the landlord doeesn't rake them over the coals when there is no where else to go to. (Which could often be the case..) You build in renewal options as part of the deal. Those can last a long long time. May even have (probably does) a 'right of first refusal' and so on.
So if DDG degraded in quality I'd be fine, because I don't expect perfection. Though I suppose it depends on how much, of course.
DDG used the Yahoo Boss API [0] originally. It was pretty good, but Yahoo shut it down and Bing now also powers their search engine.
In July 2009, Microsoft and Yahoo! announced a deal in which Bing would power Yahoo! Search. All Yahoo! Search global customers and partners made the transition by early 2012. The deal was altered in 2015, meaning Yahoo! was only required to use Bing for a "majority" of searches.
I know for sure people have said DDG is better over time. I can’t imagine it was very good in 2008 or 2009.
Note: I know Yahoo is Bing behind the scene - I'm just saying the technical implementation at the time was not tied exclusively to "bing.com".
2016 is the year Yahoo was sold to Verizon. 2 years later, Verizon writes down $4.6B of the AOL Yahoo subsidiary. A year after that they sell Tumblr in a fire sale. Verizon stopped caring about their web media empire when they did the write down/sale too. Effectively throwing in the towel as a major web advertising hub even though they are likely still top 5 in the west after Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon. That’s peanuts to Verizon though.
I can’t imagine Verizon cares much about their deal with DDG. If Microsoft cared, it makes sense that they could have Verizon and Yahoo do what they want over lawsuit worries from DDG.
I’m being pedantic at this point and totally guessing with my assumptions. I admit the continuous praising of DDG on the web has gotten to me and likely making me feel and react this way.
2) MSFT has clauses in its contract to address this. If a commenter on HN thinks of this one minute after reading the article, you can be sure that their legal team has thought about it too.