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Comment by boogies | Hacker News Reader

These are great, and I’m glad to be able to use them without direct contact with “Big Tech” and the tracking bloat that entails, but as I understand it DuckDuckGo is more or less a glorified — albeit relatively glorious and pleasant — proxy to Big Tech’s Bing (well, more, not less, because it does add some great conveniences like the IIUC formerly open source Instant Answers¹ and !bangs, and some fraction of results from its own crawler, and likely some from Yandex. But still, the largest fraction of its core service seems dependent on Bing. Not that that’s its fault or there are attractive alternatives).

1: (Edit) https://duckduckhack.com/

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Yeah, I wonder what their long-term plan is there. Surely to get substantially better, they'll have to move off Bing at some point (or buy Bing off Microsoft!). In any case, as long as DDG is a "privacy-stripping proxy" (which I believe it is), it's just using Bing technology as a search API, which doesn't seem too problematic.

I agree. Fortunately, to move off Bing doesn’t have to be a sudden flip of a binary switch.

> 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). — https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/so...

I find their instant answers fairly useful, enough to often not use the other results at all — unfortunately for them enough to use some of the sites some answers are sourced from directly, in particular often using my browsers’ built in Wikipedia searches.

DuckDuckBot I can’t judge, because I don’t know which results come from it (previous comments on HN seem to show the amount of difference between DDG and Bings results vary between search terms¹), but it seems that non-Bing links are a thing and DDG can adjust what fraction of the page they take as whatever gap there is between them and the bigger crawlers’ narrows or widens.

1: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Among other characteristics, I'm finding DDG works when searched via a Tor proxy, and even offers an Onion URL (https://3g2upl4pq6kufc4m.onion/).

Google 1) fails to work without JS for me much of the time and 2) throws up endless ReCAPTCHAs, so I generally don't bother (not just for GWS, but Scholar, Ngram viewer, and other actually-useful tools). My preferred response (https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/104371588129861216) produces very faded joy over Tor.

DuckDucGo's classic link results are verbatim from Bing (or sometimes Yandex instead). DuckDuckBot is only used to grab favicons and a subset of its rich results (instant answers, zero-click info).

Don't take my word for it; you can compare DDG and Bing results for esoteric queries side-by-side. The order of the results may vary since search results aren't deterministic, but you'll find them to be otherwise identical. You can also ask staff in help channels about the details of where link results are sourced from.

I've been using Bing, directly, more and more in the past few years, when Google either gives no useful results at all, or blocks me for trying to use it with more precise queries. Overall its breadth is still lacking, but occasionally it finds useful things which Google doesn't (or won't?) find. It also doesn't try to mangle (only truncates when too long) URLs.

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