> I really wish DDG would innovate on search, improve their own crawlers & indexing and then attack Google head on by comparing better results with the ad-ridden, SEO-flooded shit show that Google results have become.
DuckDuckGo's organic results are proxied from Bing (or sometimes Yandex). Their crawler (DuckDuckBot) just fetches favicons and scrapes data for a few Instant Answers.
Most of DuckDuckGo's non-privacy-related selling points are their instant answers, which in my experience are really good.
Alternative indexing engines to the "Big Three" English indexers (Google, Bing, Yandex) with decent privacy include Mojeek, Right Dao, Gigablast, Gowiki, wbsrch, and others. I've counted 16 English alternatives in all.