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Comment by srvmshr | Hacker News Reader

Serious Question: How is the DDG search structured? Is it a cosmetic skin over Bing, or is it aggregating from other sites like Yahoo, ecosia etc additionally?

If it is just Bing under the hood, how does it exist as business entity. I am sure MS will take some action to consolidate their search share rather than seeing splintered.

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DDG is Bing, they use its API to get the search results. They augment it with other sources to provide the "value added" part, but that's a tiny part. DDG doesn't want you to know that it is Bing, but Bing is what it is.

HN constantly mentions DDG is really just Bing in disguise and they're essentially the same. However, that can't be entirely true because they produce different results for the same search term.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=obscure+search+term&ia=web

https://www4.bing.com/search?q=obscure+search+term

That being said, when Bing censored "tank man", DDG's image search also produced 0 results for "tank man".

It is Bing, but they seem to use different ranking and filtering on the index.vIf you make complex queries it is quite obvious. Since they have zero transparency the details of their system and deal with bing is unclear.

Between geotargeting and A/B testing and possible differences between the Bing API and public website you really can't conclude that DDG is not just what they get from Bing based on one example.

Did you try in incognito? Your search gave me nearly identical results.

Very different ones here.

> If it is just Bing under the hood, how does it exist as business entity.

They provide an alternative branding, targeted at "privacy-aware" users and hipsters.

DDG does run ads just like Bing and Google, so it's just a way for Bing to get more search ad inventory out there.

Once upon a time there were other sites that did the same thing with Google, but eventually Google decided they didn't need third parties to drive search traffic.

They aggregate from "over 400 sources" and run their own crawler: https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/so...

That's just their corporate propaganda. For the most part, it's Bing with some additional features.

Their crawler (DuckDuckBot) doesn't have much of an impact on the search results, it's mainly used to provide instant answers. [1]

[1]: https://seirdy.one/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-indexe...

To be fair the instant answers are usually quite good!

Do they list their "sources"?

It reads like they are saying a website = source, and the hyperlink for the sources is dead.

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