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Comment by abbadadda | Hacker News Reader

> There are only very few truly independent search engines in the world. Google, Bing, Yandex, and Baidu are the best known ones. Most other players only white label results from those four and are dependent on them and their business model.

Does this mean the article is insinuating that DuckDuckGo is dependent on another search engine? Is this true? Or are DDG results organic?

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There are prolly only 3 global English language indexes. Google, Bing, Yandex. DDG uses vague language to make themselves look like they are actual search engines, which would make you think they actually index the web.

The truth is they rely largely on Bing and Google results and mostly just rerank them. That's why it's hard to take their PR seriously.

DDG's main selling point is that they respect your privacy. I could not care less where they get their results from. As such, I continue to take their "PR" seriously.

All I'm saying is it's pointless to consider them a realistic competitor of Google, Bing etc. when they basically punt over the most crucial infra aspect of being a search engine and when their service is more akin to querying the Bing API from a headless browser and mildly rearranging the results.

It's also clear that they try to obfuscate this fact by claiming "more than 500 signals / sources", which means they feel that being more upfront about the truth would work against them.

DDG primarily relies on Bing for its search ads.

I wouldn't be surprised if it is the primary source of their search results either.

Developing a new search engine from scratch that can compete with Google is almost impossible unless you are at the scale of Microsoft.

It is much easier to white label an existing search engine so you can have good search results on day one.

DDG depends very heavily on Bing.

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