Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bing has a brand problem.
This. You can tell by the popularity of DuckDuckGo, which is just reskinned rebranded Bing.
In search in particular, search results have been more than web links since the early 2000s when instant answers started to appear on Yahoo. Since then, more and more of the page is instant answers of one kind or another (aka search modules, oneboxes, etc.) and less and less of it is traditional web links.
AI-assisted answers has accelerated this even more in the past two years, and we get 0 of that from Bing. Same with knowledge graph answers before that (e.g., info from Wikipedia and other quick facts, which became the most prevalent search module on desktop), again, 0 from Bing. And same for the most prevalent search module on mobile too — local results — 0 from Bing.
That is to say, a lot of our search results content is not coming from Bing. We have hundreds of team members and millions of lines of search code at this point. We’re constantly working on search, and looking to improve it. We post updates quarterly to https://duckduckgo.com/updates (along with updates on our other products and services).
In terms of traditional web links, yes, we primarily use Bing as an input in the same way Kagi primarily uses Google as an input. As Vlad has said publicly (most recently heard him on The Talk Show) and has been made clear from this US v Google case from Google/Bing/Apple/OpenAI/etc. testimony, it costs upwards of a billion dollars a year to maintain a competitive index of web links. Only the biggest companies can afford that. Nevertheless, we still work on actively crawling and indexing, but the reality is small companies cannot do it all themselves. In fact, that's true for most products in most industries -- they rely on a supply chain for various components, some of them critical.
Finally, even if you have the same traditional links, but you put instant answers above or beside or in between them, change the design significantly, or otherwise add to them (all of which we do), then the actual user experience of the search results ends up being significantly different in terms of how it is perceived and what people click on. For the latter, people engage with a section above another section about twice as much, so for example, if you just put a different box/answer on top you've drastically changed the experience of the search engine.