They apparently do some web crawling of their own, but mainly leech off of other search engines
“They apparently do some web crawling of their own, but mainly leech off of other search engines.”
Yes, they claim that too. But here is the thing. Take Google for example... Google actually has two sources DDG can tap. A “raw” source that has no algorithms adjusting the content, and a source with algorithms adjusting the content.
When DDG first came out they were using the raw content source and it was straight forward and unbiased. Then for some reason they switched to the biased algorithm source.
So I think they sold out to Google in order to piggyback off Google. Greed over principle... It always ruins everything that starts off good and honest.