“The problem with Duck Duck Go is that it is a search aggregator (or compiler) so it passes along the bias of underlying search engines as well as adding a layer of censorship of its own. Their product is privacy, not search results.”
Unfortunately that is a fact. I am perplexed why someone has not provided an honest stand alone search engine. Custom web crawlers are not hard to make.
They apparently do some web crawling of their own, but mainly leech off of other search engines