DDG uses Bing as well as a bunch of other sources, including their own crawlers. Portraying it as a sort of "Bing in disguise" is incorrect.

Their own crawler is not used for organic search results. See sibling comment.

Wait, really? I thought DuckDuckGo merely implemented APIs ("bangs") to fallback search engine providers in case a user preferred it.

Surely DuckDuckGo has implemented their own search engine, crawler and indexer apart from other providers?

> Surely DuckDuckGo has implemented their own search engine, crawler and indexer apart from other providers?

No. They have their own crawler but it's only used for Instant Answers and other widget stuff.

https://duck.co/help/results/sources

> 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.

So in other words, all organic search results come from Bing and Oath.

But then what's the point?

EDIT: This is an honest question, not snark. I'd appreciate an honest answer instead of a blind drive-by downvote. I don't learn anything about why a thin UI layer over a bunch of search engines I can access directly is useful for privacy if you just downvote my comment.

Because you're not accessing the search engines directly, you're going through a sort of proxy that hides your identity.

I have to agree I’m dissapointed by this. I thought there was at least one party with an independent web search engine.