IIRC that thought process was where DDG started some years back now. It was developed in the open wrt HN, by a then HN regular. My recollection is they started

IIRC that thought process was where DDG started some years back now. It was developed in the open wrt HN, by a then HN regular. My recollection is they started by doing their own crawling. (I want to say the username was Weinberg?? But honestly can't recall if that's right.) TBH it's probably also the thought that Google started on, as principally we had manual indexes back then. Again IIRC, DDG got along way with private indexing and then realised it didn't really gain them much and they instead wanted to focus on being a Google competitor. They did that by focusing on instant answers as a distributing feature and by buying results to get closer to the coverage they needed. Lucky for them Google made their search a lot worse so DDG's quality caught up.