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DDG and Bing

Noted by on his . Last updated . Changelog


I was referring to crawlers that build indexes for search engines to use. DuckDuckGo does have a crawler—DuckDuckBot—but it’s only used for fetching favicons and scraping certain sites for infoboxes (“instant answers”, the fancy widgets next to/above the classic link results).

DuckDuckGo and other engines that use Bing’s commercial API have contractual arrangements that typically include a clause that says something like “don’t you dare change our results, we don’t want to create a competitor to Bing that has better results than us”. Very few companies manage to negotiate an exception; DuckDuckGo is not one of those companies, to my knowledge.

So to answer your question: it’s irrelevant. “html.duckduckgo.com” is a JS-free front-end to DuckDuckGo’s backend, and mostly serves as a proxy to Bing results.

For the record, Google isn’t any different when it comes to their API. That’s why Ixquick shut down and pivoted to Startpage; Google wasn’t happy with Ixquick integrating multiple sources.

More info on search engines.