I believe a few years ago startpage was sold to an advertising company.

Which is also what DDG is.

Is it?

Yes? Offering ad space (and placing affiliate links) is how they make money.

Difference to Google is how they position themselves in regards to privacy, and that Google actually built a search engine. Both make their money by providing ad space.

Where are the ads?

Maybe search with DDG with your ad blocker off? The first 75% of the page was ads for me.

Why are you using the internet without multiple ad blockers?

Oh boy. I loved ixquick/startpage until 2020(?) when it suddenly stopped working and demanded I turn on JS.

I did no such thing but looked around and found the company had been sold to an advertiser/tracker. It used to work much, much better than ddg:(

Is DDG proxied bing? I found DDG search results to be much better than bing.

Yes, it is. Bing has gotten a lot better recently. This is a good write up on indexes: https://seirdy.one/posts/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-...

Bing still refuses to index one of my pages, telling me to follow their rules. They won't tell me what rule I'm in violation of, though, and I can't tell that I'm in violation of any of them.

And this is educational content, text only, no ads or popups, no SEO hacking. Bing's analysis tool told me only that I was missing the "lang" attribute from my HTML tag. So I added it, but of course that wasn't the issue.

I reached out to them, and they replied saying that the page didn't meet the requirements for listing, but didn't elaborate.

It certainly makes me wonder what content their broken algorithm is missing.

And it sucks because it means DDG is missing that content, too.

No. It’s Bing in the same way that Uber is Elastic Search. It’s built on Bing and other tools and adds, tweaks, adjusts, etc. Calling DDG a Bing proxy is somewhere between misleading and dishonest.

I believe DDG uses Bing's index but has their own ranking algorithm.

They use Bing API on the background. Likely mixing in their own content.

You can also use Whoogle if you’d rather self host.

https://github.com/benbusby/whoogle-search

Whoogle is best in class, but doesn't provide much benefit unless combined with a rotating VPN. It also doesn't solve the "GBY" problem, where the majority of search engines rely on Google/Bing/Yandex's indices instead of using their own.

This is especially dangerous because it propagates an illusion that there's dozens of engines to choose from. The reality is these three companies control more and more of humanity's ingress to information, censoring what they see fit for political/financial gain.

Startpage results are so bad I just thought it was a home-made search engine rather than a Google proxy. How is this possible?

Funny, I find them to be identical to Google's results localized for Sweden. Are you possibly using Google Search logged in or saving cookies between closing tabs (i.e. not using Cookie AutoDelete)?

Not at all, I dont have Google account for the last 12 years or so so no idea how that is.