Most of DuckDuckGo's "10-pack" of traditional search results come from Bing: https://help.duckduckgo.com/results/sources/?redir=1#:~:text...
I don't know the intent of the "but it uses Bing" posts to just be "in case you didn't know" or "it's lame because it just uses Bing" or something in between. It just seems to me these comments are missing the forest through the tree.
From my experience, it isn’t very good, and I’ve had DuckDuckGo as my default search engine for years, at first to give DuckDuckGo the old college try, but now primarily to be able to replicate a feature I had in Firefox in Safari and iOS Spotlight (being able to redirect a search to any search engine with a keyword).
If it’s fine for you for most things, great, but based off very recent and nearly daily data on my end, that is not my experience at all.
I do agree about Google getting worse though. There isn’t a search engine today that can even hold a candle to Google from over 10 years ago including Google itself. Unfortunately, the closest thing is still Google.
Case in point is car parts - find an obscure part from a Japanese Honda, for example, and attempt to find it in DDG. I'll wait. :P
Also every time this comment is posted, someone tries to argue that it doesn’t come from Bing despite zero evidence so it’s a TIL for more than you think.