There are alternatives to google. I'm not talking only about duck or millionshort[0]. I'm talking about p2p-like search engine like searx[1] and yacy[2]. If some of these independent search engines could collaborate implementing a API to allow cross service search sharing, I think the google search monopoly would soon be threatened.
> DuckDuckGo's results are a compilation of "over 400" sources,[45] including Yahoo! Search BOSS, Wolfram Alpha, Bing, Yandex, its own web crawler (the DuckDuckBot) and others
That refers to their Instant Answers. The regular link results ("organic results") are proxied from Bing. You can compare them side by side; the order of the results may vary slightly because Bing varies things a little, but the links are the same.
The DuckDuckBot scrapes data from select websites for some Instant Answers and it grabs favicons for other sites.
[0] https://millionshort.com/
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Searx
[2] https://yacy.net/