To my knowledge duck duck go uses Bing's search API to get their results. To me Bing and Google have not been sufficient for my searching needs and the needs of a large group around me for a long time now.
On a separate but related issue because DDG is using Bing the overall experience is lackluster, as other user's have noted
things like very slow to re-index new results, new information climbs up to the top very slowly and often times I have to switch off their search with a ! command to get my results because they just aren't working. But if I have to do that I'd rather be on that other search site entirely.
To be fair google also for the last few years has also started providing a very lack luster search experience and using dark patterns around their results to get you to click ads.
They all kind of suck.
My opinion is biased though because I'm currently working on a new search engine to solve these things.
It's actually Bing+ other sources, there's a page on their site that explains it.
And I had the same opinion as you, until I started using it every day. My habit was as follows: When I didn't get good results, I would switch back to Google and run the same query. Over time I found more "purple" links in Google indicating DDG was giving me almost the same (sometimes better) results.
That's an interesting process, I'll have to give it a try ;)
I mentioned it above but Google has also been giving me worse results in recent years so I genuinely believe there's a better way to do these things and do them in a way that is also more respectful of the users.
And the "four hundred sources" link links to 400 special case replies. They are probably useful, but fire rarely. It's basically Bing, and that page is a bunch of spin.
A search in Bing for "cult of the dead cow" seems to give me some localized (Japan) results, while DDG has a bunch of American Beto O'Rourke politics news pieces added.
The Bing API provides a different set than Bing itself. Compare "cult of the dead cow" on Ecosia Japan (which is a straight-up Bing API proxy) with DDG Japan and you will see that the results are identical.
If that’s the case, then I’m sticking with Ecosia since it uses Bing as well. Not sure if Ecosia has it’s own crawler, but at least they appropriate some profits to plant trees.
They also have an alias to redirect the search to google if the initial search doesn’t yield anything useful.
On a separate but related issue because DDG is using Bing the overall experience is lackluster, as other user's have noted things like very slow to re-index new results, new information climbs up to the top very slowly and often times I have to switch off their search with a ! command to get my results because they just aren't working. But if I have to do that I'd rather be on that other search site entirely.
To be fair google also for the last few years has also started providing a very lack luster search experience and using dark patterns around their results to get you to click ads.
They all kind of suck.
My opinion is biased though because I'm currently working on a new search engine to solve these things.