This has nothing to do with search. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31490603. And that's not actually how we make our results either -- our results are actually made anonymously from a variety of sources. In particular, when people search, we believe they’re really looking for answers, as opposed to just links. For many categories of searches (restaurants, lyrics, weather, etc.), there is usually a specialized search engine (e.g., Tripadvisor), content site (e.g., Musixmatch), or dedicated source (e.g., DarkSky) that does a better job of actually answering searches than a general search engine can with just links. Our long-term goal has been for over a decade to get you Instant Answers from these best sources.
Most of our search result pages now feature one or more Instant Answers. To deliver Instant Answers on specific topics, DuckDuckGo leverages many sources, including specialized sources like Sportradar and crowd-sourced sites like Wikipedia. We also maintain our own crawler (DuckDuckBot) and many indexes to support our results. Of course, we have more traditional links in our search results too, which we do largely source from Bing, but that's just part of the page. Our focus is synthesizing all these sources to create a superior search experience, and there is a lot of technology behind it. For example, local searches appear on most mobile searches, and none of that is coming from Bing.