Lycos was already a rebranded Bing/Google before that.
Three companies have actual spiders and any dB worth something: google, microsoft (bing), baidu and Yandex.
Everybody else is a rebrand, reshuffle, even the small ones who have recently started running their own small indexes mixed into the main google/bing/yandex results they rebrand.
This is a scale /money issue.
Basically IT Fortune Top 5 in the world would have money and scale to compete in this place, but Google practically owns the search space.
This has been the state of affairs for 10+ years or so.
There've been red flags for DDG for a couple of years
Lycos was already a rebranded Bing/Google before that.
Three companies have actual spiders and any dB worth something: google, microsoft (bing), baidu and Yandex.
Everybody else is a rebrand, reshuffle, even the small ones who have recently started running their own small indexes mixed into the main google/bing/yandex results they rebrand.
This is a scale /money issue.
Basically IT Fortune Top 5 in the world would have money and scale to compete in this place, but Google practically owns the search space.
This has been the state of affairs for 10+ years or so.