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You get the same results on DuckDuckGo, etc. there's no search engine lock-in here.

No tajen, at least the Wikipedia article for DDG gives no hint that it uses the Google backend. Nor had I ever heard of such a thing.

Sorry, doesn't DDG use Google as a back-end, just anonymizing the results?

DDG uses a variety of search engines' responses, including Google's. It has its own crawler as well.