"or even DDG although DDG is more a search utility rather than a search engine as it doesn't have its own web index."
Looks like you might be wrong about that.
DuckDuckGo gets its results from over 50 sources, including DuckDuckBot (our own crawler), crowd-sourced sites (in our own index), Yahoo! (through BOSS), embed.ly, WolframAlpha, EntireWeb, Bing, and Blekko.
DDG actually pulls its results from Yandex and several other sources. Why limit yourself to a single, old-fashioned crawler, when you can use one of the most innovative meta-search engines?
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.
Most people are going to use Google, maybe Bing, maybe Bahoo!, and are barely aware of and would not use another search engine.
Those that do know about DDG will either use it or not.
Whenever I include a search link in an email (or HN thread) it's always a DDG link, except for those rare searches where I get nothing back from DDG. I think that's one of the best ways to promote DDG. Bonus, the DDG search links are unadulterated.
And by the way, if you want to search google a little more anonymously, do it via DDG. In your search bar or on DDG's page, type in !g your search term. You'll be redirected to Google's search, and the URL will be relatively clean:
> In fact, DuckDuckGo gets its results from over four hundred sources. These include hundreds of vertical sources delivering niche Instant Answers, DuckDuckBot (our crawler) and crowd-sourced sites (like Wikipedia, stored in our answer indexes). We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we source from Bing, Yahoo, and Yandex.
So DuckDuckBot is not used for any normal indexing. All actual search results are from Bing, Yahoo and Yandex.
> In fact, DuckDuckGo gets its results from over four hundred sources. These include hundreds of vertical sources delivering niche Instant Answers, DuckDuckBot (our crawler) and crowd-sourced sites (like Wikipedia, stored in our answer indexes). We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we also source from a variety of partners, including Oath (formerly Yahoo) and Bing.
What this means is that they use 400 sources for things like Instant Answers and other widgets but Yahoo and Bing for all their organic search results.
DDG has their own cralwer[1], so it would appear it also gets its own search results, even if may get some search results from other search engines.
[1]: https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckbot
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