It's not fake news. They confirm it themselves: https://duck.co/help/results/sources https://duck.co/help/results/sources > In fact, DuckDuckGo gets its result

It's not fake news. They confirm it themselves: https://duck.co/help/results/sources https://duck.co/help/results/sources > In fact, DuckDuckGo gets its results from over four hundred sources. These include hundreds of vertical sources delivering niche Instant Answers, DuckDuckBot (our crawler) and crowd-sourced sites (like Wikipedia, stored in our answer indexes). We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we also source from a variety of partners, including Oath (formerly Yahoo) and Bing. In other words, all organic results are from Bing and Oath.