[rjf72]

You know there's something weird. You could prove your little hypothesis here wrong in less time than it took you to write it. So why state something that's wrong?

I tested this by choosing to search for something completely random that would return unusual results and give a decent indicator of whether or not DDG was just copy-pasting results, so to speak. I searched for "extent space taco secure", no quotations. Bing seems to have exploded when I searched for this. The results are completely nonsensical and seem to have nothing to do with what I searched for. The first two hits are to Google, the first about webhp (apparently some virus?) and the other to their chrome page. Other links include things like links to fidelity.com, americanexpress.com, and the huffington post front page.

DDG's results are [mostly] reasonable and populated mostly by things like some recent event where the head of NASA mentioned space security. Though it does have a link to the SF bay area craigslist alongside a couple of other really weird ones. In any case, you can see for yourself. Suffice to say they're definitely not just replicating results, at least not from Bing.

[WD-42]

You could also read their documentation: https://duckduckgo.com/api

> Because of the way we generate our search results, we unfortunately do not have the rights to fully syndicate our results, free or paid.

That page links to: https://help.duckduckgo.com/results/sources/

Where, after you get past a bunch of stuff about their "instant answers" gets to the root of it:

> We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we also source from a variety of partners, including Verizon Media (formerly Yahoo) and Bing.

So yes, maybe I was wrong saying results come only from Bing. But they definitely source their search results.

I'm not knocking DDG here, I use it as my daily search driver. If you were to try and build a search engine today with limited resources would you really try to start from scratch? The way DDG has approached the problem (by sourcing results from other search engines) seems like the only reasonable way to be even remotely competitive.

[rjf72]

Yes, they source their results. This is not the extent of your claims. You were stating that they directly rip from other engines meaning that, in your words, "In order for search results to get better on DDG, they first need to get better on their partner search engines".

That is simply completely wrong, as my example showed extremely clearly. The one and only weakness of sourcing from third parties is that if they are not indexing some site, you also will not be indexing it. You were implying they are directly dependent on the ordering and quality of the other engines, which is obviously and provably false.