Nope, they aren’t. At least not just. DuckDuckGo uses Bing among about 400 other sources like Yandex, Wolfram Alpha, Yahoo! Search BOSS and even their own webcrawler. On top of that, they filter out and downrank content mills, pages with too much advertising and websites deemed to have low journalistic standards. So is literally bringing together the search results from all the sources and filtering out the garbage. And on top of that, they have way less ads and tracking than either Google or Bing