They probably start with Bing results and do custom filtering, ranking and presentation, so without the initial Bing results they can't do anything.

I believe that generally refers to all their custom answers, e.g. when you search for "weather <place name>". Nevertheless, those don't seem to work either.

I definitely felt misled, when I first learned about this, back when they censored Tank Man the same time Bing did[0]. I did remain a user though, mostly because I haven't felt like keeping up who the current good guys are. Lately I have been considering Kagi, but I don't like it that I need to log in on all my devices, and then I have to have a fallback, for when I'm not on my own devices.

So yeah, for my intents and purposes, DDG is a frontend to Bing. I do appreciate how uncluttered it is though, in comparison.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tank_Man#Censorship

There are only 3 planet scale search indices I think. Google, Bing and Yandex. Everyone else is just rehashing those results.

Absurd. They have been doing search for so long and couldn't build their own search index? I understand it's a huge investment, and clearly for some data sources you need to create partnerships and depend on others (e.g., youtube videos). But you would think that a search engine company would invest more in this area.

This. At some point in the past I was giving a "test drive" to DuckDuckGo. And the moment when I realised that they are a Bing wrapper was the end of it.

I keep meaning to make a Chrome extension called DDGoogle that would reskin Google results in the style of DuckDuckGo. This way people who insist on using DDG wouldn't have to endure Bing-quality results.

comparing their search result with bing for at least the first 3 or 4 pages you'll see a very high correlation to bing's result (as long as you're logged out of bing). The main thing is they proxy your search for you and give half way decent results like bing.

Yeah, exactly. They're mostly a front end for Bing. I know they have their fans, and this remark will probably anger them, but I have never understood the point of DDG.

Data point: Bing was not down for me.