Thanks @floughry for sharing your thoughts. DuckDuckGo is actually “Bing” lite; they have never used the Google API as far as we know. They started with Yahoo! but they abandoned their independent search engine and now also use Bing. DuckDuckGo also used Yandex at some point but I don’t think they do so now and exclusively use Microsoft Bing and Azure. The do have their instant answers using verious APIs and some indexin, but predominantly they send search queries, at least and $ for the Bing API calls and get back results and Ads.
As it happens we have just launched Search Choices and you’ll be pleased to know we included Google and Yandex.