Duck duck go simply proxies other search engines. While they have been gaining traffic, they will never be as good as google/bing etc.

Good privacy focused search requires novel innovations and a solid attempt to "solve" the problem rather than simply wrapping some other engine.

They should have some small team working on their own search engine. A handful of skilled programmers can accomplish a lot over a couple of years.

Do we know that they don't?

As many mentioned, DDG is Bing and Google under the hood. That being said, DDG is great and I’m very thankful it exists.

Shameless Plug: I’m involved in a project called Private Search [1], and we are always interested in partnerships with browsers. Feel free to contact me directly. My email is in my profile!

[1] https://private.sh

DDG is the wolf disguised as the sheep. If you consider the vast possibilities a company is able to trace you over the internets it's largely irrelevant where are you coming from, as long as you hop once over a server operated by BigCorp.

And in the case of DDG the results come from Bing. From the rain in the eaves.

Or better to https://yacy.net or SearX.

As generic as Brave's then. What's your point?

That both are worth ziltch.

I believe it's a legally binding statement. Which is not as good as a mathematical proof, but better than nothing.

Afaik it's Bing?