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Comment by mikkom | Hacker News Reader

Duckduckgo results are from bing via bing api so you are essentially saying that you like bing results more than google results.

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Per https://help.duckduckgo.com/results/sources/, "...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 multiple partners, though most commonly from Bing (and none from Google)."

So yes, while they do get results from Bing, it's a bit disingenuous to say that DuckDuckGo is just Bing.

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.

The page I linked above doesn't mention DuckDuckHack. Are you quoting that from a different source? It does mention DuckDuckBot which is their own web crawler.

https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/du...

Hey cool, then that page changed recently. I hadn't heard of duckduckbot, that's exciting!

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.

Not necessarily - I would imagine many searches directly using Bing would return some form of "personalization" extending past the search terms itself. Duckduckgo claims not to consider this AFAIK. Although maybe the same supposed benefits of a search based purely on query could be achieved by a Bing or Google search without cookies.

Is that really all there is to it? Present results from Bing, and done?

If you exclude Instant Answers and widgets then pretty much, but the important thing is that they don't send your PII to Bing. Not saying that sarcastically. For me it doesn't matter what the underlying data source is.

Can we please stop this meme? Every thread about DDG invariably seems to bring up this (false) statement.

How is it false? It literally says all traditional links are mostly from Bing: "We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we also source from multiple partners, though most commonly from Bing (and none from Google)."

All the other 400 sources and their own crawler are just used for Instant Answers and widgets.

It's the truth. I'm sure representatives of DDG can correct us if this is not the case.

However they have never done so.

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