I use Bing and DuckDuckGo somewhat interchangeably. Bing is particularly useful at work since I'm usually looking up Microsoft support issues (and they pay you to use their search in Amazon gift cards, which is nice), and DDG is obviously much better for privacy.
Not sure about bing, but DuckDuckGo is basically Yahoo with the search spam filtered out. On heavily spammed searches DDG has become noticeably better, IMO.
I like that DuckDuckGo uses Bing as a source and DDG acts as a proxy to Bing. Bing is a huge personal-data grab by Microsoft and all their recent AI is just cruft I will never use, personally.
DDG is great, but as the other commenter said, it uses Bing mostly as its underlying search engine, which might not get you the results you're looking for (it's better at some things than Google, worse at others). For privacy though, DDG is great so I use it as my first-line search and then go to Google if I really need to.
The reason that Bing and DuckDuckGo have such similar results is that DDG uses Bing's search API, so the comparison here is only really between Bing and Google.
Isn't DuckDuckGo just a wrapper around Bing search results? I see lots of complaints about DDG search results but those complaints should be directed to Bing, not DDG.
(I understand that DDG does some value-add to the results returned by the Bing API).
Can't use duckduckgo. It's just dreadful. If it's a wrapper for bing, then it's a shit wrapper because they're actually worse than bing. I get different results for the same search and ddg is by far the worst. Right now I'm using a searx endpoint. Waaaaay better.
There's more to the services DDG offers than just private search via Bing. DDG has built its own technology around specific types of searches and queries. The main search product is powered by Bing, but it's not fair to say it's just "a Bing frontend".
I thought that DDG is effectively a (privacy-preserving) front-end on Bing, so it makes sense that Bing would give the same or similar results. (Maybe they're doing some of their own indexing these days? I haven't been paying close attention.)
I don't think it's relevant to answering the question "Should I use DDG". I do think it's relevant to know DDG doesn't provide diversity in search results.
I'm pretty sure DuckDuckGo has a contract with Bing.
For past few years, I go to try DuckDuckGo every once in a while (especially when someone suggests that again on HN), but it disappoints me every time with the quality of search results.
Also, if it is using Bing on inside, I'm not then sure why the results are still different than that(even at the places where there's no scope for personalization). For example type this line exactly in both bing and ddg:
difference between std list and std set
The first result DDG shows is of a difference between set and a vector - not only that, it also highlights that result in a Google Card inspired fashion (which is worse because Google does that only when they have a certain amount of confidence in the answer), while the first result Bing shows is an actual difference between list and a set. So either Bing is cheating DDG, or DDG is doing something stupid on top of its results. (Also, if you cover the above string in quotes, Bing still shows 'some' search results, while DDG doesn't).
May be after using the '!' ninja techniques it'll be same as Google, but then I have also come to love the fact that I can type in 'my next flight' or 'Show me emails from ....' or 'remind me to ... ' and other personalized things on Google so may be my priorities are different here.
DDG is essentially Bing made more private, with a little Yandex. I use it, because I like the privacy, but I don't think they deserve the credit for search result quality.
Bing is actually much better than DDG (for recent near real time results) and now it's in many cases better than Google (less SEO spam, probably due to its size). It is also more politically neutral than Google in its results - I started out using Bing for anything politics related, but now switched for many technical and financial searches too.
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