Yeah it seems way more smaller search engines use Bing than Google, I’m not sure why but I’m guessing either API costs or privacy agreements? DDG did get into hot water a couple of years ago over this because Bing was serving ads which were not private and were potentially profiling DDG users. No company is perfect all the time but they did promptly attempt to fix the issue. I do like them as far as tech firms go.

Phind has its own approach with various automated prompts and UI functions. It’s free to use so you can compare the differences in function.

I don’t even think I’ve ever heard the word “propitiatory” used so TIL from my own error

If you’re a programmer, might I suggest the brave new world of ChatGPT enhanced search via Phind.com

Even if you’re not, it’s fantastic. It basically takes your input and processes it like ChatGPT but then is trained to run web searches to grab further information and uses that to progress its own internal monologue. The result is a natural language response with search engine like results down the side which are cited within the main response.

My process is:

• Search DDG
• If that’s not satisfactory (it is IME about 80% of the time) prefix with !sp to search googles index proxied by start page

Where did you hear this? This isn’t true. If you want google without the tracking, use StartPage (if you’re using DDG this can be accessed with the !sp bang preface)

DDG uses Bing as their fallback engine but also does a lot of propitiatory indexing of its own

https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/sources/