If I use DDG outside of China, and its results are sanitized of anything that offends the CCP, I will hold DDG accountable for that. It doesn't matter if under the hood DDG sources search results from somewhere else, DDG is the one serving me censored results. DDG "implemented" censorship. DDG is accountable.
From my point of view, there's a difference between displaying censored results from a 3rd party and implementing censorship. In this case, Microsoft / Bing censored their results and everyone relying on their results passed the censored results along.
No doubt this is bad, but we know who did the censoring (Microsoft). DDG? I guess we can blame them for using a bad source and for not double checking stuff like this (if that's even possible/viable)?
Anyway, what to use instead? The main alt search engines usually use Bing (DDG, Qwant, Ecosia, Yahoo Search, etc). The only one I'm aware that uses a different source is Startpage (they use Google), but now they're owned by an ad tech company (why not stick with Google in that case?). There's also Brave Search (they have their own index, but also include results from Google and Bing if you want), but it's still in beta and I'm not sure if it's ready yet for prime time.
So... no Bing or Bing-powered search engines. What's left? Yandex? Maybe some Searx instance (which never worked that well for my needs)? Going back to Google?
If Google is the only search engine that doesn't implement Chinese censorship outside of China, then that sounds a lot better than alts that censor search results via Bing.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/jun/04/microsoft...
Don't get me wrong, it doesn't make them look good, but the problem was the with the source of their results, not them censoring "tank man".