DuckDuckGo is really Bing under the covers... People are literally moving from Google back to Microsoft, and feeling good about it because it has different branding.
Source: https://www.quora.com/How-is-the-Bing-API-used-by-DuckDuckGo
Source: https://www.quora.com/How-is-the-Bing-API-used-by-DuckDuckGo
I’m not particularly concerned with the backing engine as long as they’re not tracking me and I’m getting acceptable results.
[1] https://duck.co/help/results/sources
[2] https://duck.co/forum/comment/27893
[3] https://duck.co/forum/thread/4350/did-you-know-that-duckduck...
Just to give a bit of context, that forum discussion was 8 months before Snapchat was founded and 6 months before Google bought Motorola Mobility (which split off just before the thread in question).
> We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we also source from a variety of partners, including Oath (formerly Yahoo) and Bing.
All organic links are sourced from Oath and Bing. The other 400 sources (and their crawler) are only used for widget style stuff.
They use Bing. That's something else than:
> DuckDuckGo is really Bing under the covers [...]
Bing returned just one result - An issue on Github
DDG shows multiple results. The bing one is result number 4.
I think they include Bing results but augment it with their own spider.
This is not a new thing. Historically speaking numerous "search engines" have actually used different engines under the hood. Yahoo hasn't been "Yahoo" in a long time, for instance, and I believe AltaVista moved from its own engine to somebody else's for a good long time before its demise.
(There's probably an interesting and nuanced discussion of the virtues and perils of a search engine provider depending on another company for something so critical. I hope DDG is investing significantly into their own engine, even if it's not ready-to-go.)
And it's a real change. I wouldn't even particularly care if DuckDuckGo did use Google, because the things about Google I find most objectionable would still be solved by proxying through DDG. Not 100%. The result might serve AMP pages, which is annoying, and not being a Silicon Valley liberal, I can clearly see how censorious Google is with its search results, or at least, how much they tilt the scales in their own political favor. But the primary issue, tracking me and the monetization thereto, would still be solved.
Using DDG for Bing, or Startpage.com/Ixquick for Google, or Searx for either of them, should not provide the original search engine with your data. Bing and Google should just see actually anonymous search queries coming in from DDG / Startpage / whatever you're using, instead of seeing the search requests coming from your browser session.
At least this is my understanding of it - please correct me if I understand this wrong. But if this is the right way to understand it, I don't get how using DDG would then be equivalent to using a Microsoft product directly.
Their ads also run via Bing Ads. This is something they really should change a believe. I tried to run ads for Simple Analytics on DDG but it feels very wrong to use Bing Ads for that. You can't also select "Run on DuckDuckGo only". I think they should move to something of themselves which is likely to happen if they grow bigger.
I decided to search for "space engine exhaust". The reason I searched for this is because it has some hot keywords, but also some keywords that are probably fairly uncommon. The idea was to get a mix of softball hits along with some per engine unique hits. And it looks like it was a pretty good test query. Here they are:
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=space+engine+exhaust
https://www.bing.com/search?q=space+engine+exhaust
And, lo and behold, they give very different results. DuckDuckGo may utilize Bing's results, but they are not "Bing under the covers" by any stretch of the imagination.
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Just for the sake of completion here is the google search for the same:
https://www.google.com/search?q=space+engine+exhaust
Interestingly enough I think is a good example of the increasingly large percent of queries where Google gives the clearly worst results. Their top 4/4 results all being for spaceengine.org which is a universe simulator, but very unlikely to be what somebody who was searching for 'space engine exhaust' was after.
> 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 Oath (formerly Yahoo) and Bing.
In other words, all organic results are from Bing and Oath.
That's one of the issues for me: those are your results, but there's no telling what anyone else might get when clicking on that link. "Feeds" of all kind, personalized by black boxes rather than explicit parameters we have access to, deprive us of a common (virtual) world to discuss.
My top 4 results were http://spaceengine.org/support-old/ , http://forum.spaceengine.org/viewtopic.php?t=33 , https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2018/05/23/the-... and https://www.nasa.gov/returntoflight/system/system_SSME.html
I just kept reloading the same search through a bunch of different TOR identities + anti-finger printing, and it was like playing search roulette. And indeed there were, on occasion, actually some great results that don't show up elsewhere. It's such a shame that they're all masked behind some black box of tracking with another black box of ML and filtering. It's like two people going to the same library where librarian deciding to hide books from one person or the other because she, and her all seeing eye, thought they'd have less interest in them than other books.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Main_Engine
https://www.nasa.gov/returntoflight/system/system_SSME.html
https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2018/05/23/the-...
http://www.braeunig.us/space/propuls.htm
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The 6 nonshared results are:
http://spaceengine.org/manual/making-addons/creating-a-ship/
https://phys.org/news/2018-11-ion-space-aircraft.html
https://www.meineke.com/blog/dual-exhausts-just-for-looks/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merlin_(rocket_engine_family)
https://www.space.com/34192-spacex-raptor-rocket-test-first-...
http://spaceengineers.wikia.com/wiki/Thruster_mechanics
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I just tested this from various countries to ensure this was not biasing it. It wasn't. Bing gives localized results, such as German results when searching from Germany. DDG gives identical results from any country. So presumably everybody is getting these same results from DDG. Are you saying this is also exactly what you got from Bing?
You need a better source, IMHO.
DDG themselves claim to use multiple sources, including Bing (but not including Google). I've seen DDG == Bing mentioned enough times that I'm inclined to believe they leverage it heavily, but it doesn't seem as unnuanced as just spitting out Bing API results 1:1.
It's all Bing and Oath.
That statement isn't fully supported by the link you provided. It does however seem reasonable that DDG results are based in large part on Bing and Oath.
"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 Oath (formerly Yahoo) and Bing."