Aaannd for a company that is marketed to be a privacy focused alternative to Google, DDG is doing virtually nothing to engineer their own search engine, instead choosing to rely on a corporation that's not exactly known for their privacy efforts.
Exactly. It's been such a long time since they've launched. You can't just say M$ and Goog are the only players with a large index so our hands are tied up.
Have to start working towards a long time solution or you'll be at their mercy.
Assuming the quote is correct seems questionable. How much was Google pulling in when they started again? The internet has gotten bigger, but most of the increase is it media (video, audio, and images) that you can skip indexing anyway as a first pass.