Does DuckDuckGo pay for the Bing engine? And what happens if Microsoft tries to stop them from using it, or they put some limitations on it for 3rd parties?
Of course, that puts DDG in a dangerous situation, since it depends on Microsoft. Perhaps it has a long-term binding commitment from Microsoft, though, that wouldn't surprise me either.
Let people compete over what to do with the raw data (data which is of course publicly accessible but subject to the strange inequities of crawling), how best to process and present it, not over access to it. DDG has to pay Yahoo! for a BOSS license. That is just strange when you think about how the raw data was obtained. It is publicly available information.
Nothing against Yahoo! for doing that (selling access to publicly available data), as there are many other examples of this practice across web- "everyone else is doing it". But I do not think it is "the right thing" to do.
http://www.ysearchblog.com/2011/06/27/ydn-qa-with-duckduckgo...