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As much as I love DDG, I personally find it a hard pill to swallow knowing that it's not truly an independent search engine and just an API relay of Google's stuff. I do take comfort that Google isn't getting data from 90% of my online searches, but it would be awesome to know that DDG was truly its own entity and won't be cut off for some reason in the future, like we've seen with Scroogle (which, I believe, was mostly due to API changes, not ToS violations).



My understanding is that duckduckgo uses Bing rather than google (mentioned in the comments at http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2009/03/duck-duck-go-arc...). Although that doesn't alter the validity of your concern.


My bad, then. All this time I thought Google was the back end.


No Google APIs are currently used.


Even if DuckDuckGo did get blocked eventually, it could easily switch to using a separate service. If Bing ever blocked it off, the code could be slightly altered to use Google instead.




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