> DuckDuckGo uses Bing search under the hood, and they're not making nearly enough money to do R&D on things like making the next BeRT. If only DuckDuckGo exist

> DuckDuckGo uses Bing search under the hood, and they're not making nearly enough money to do R&D on things like making the next BeRT. If only DuckDuckGo existed, search algorithm quality would stagnate and then get worse (which is bad because SEO is by definition adversarially optimizing against the ranking algorithm in order to get a page to rank higher than it naturally would, thereby imputing noise into the natural relevance signal. Google is aggressively innovating on this front and still struggling.) If you couldn't make money from ads like now, there'd be way less SEO. Most SEO just drags people onto ad spam sites with vapid auto content. Your argument about DDG is equivalent to saying "look at this natural cyclist, he's not making any prize money compared to his doped rivals". Yeah, duh. You have to remove the doping to see how he really fares against the others.