I actually have a lot of respect for DDG and what you've accomplished (well, until the recent ad campaign, but that's a different issue...)
My impression from the FAQ and your comments here is that you start with Yahoo! BOSS results, merge in other results that you suspect may be useful from your own crawl, filter out known spam pages, and possibly re-rank things afterwards according to whatever algorithms you have. Hence, "Bing with a bunch of twiddles on top." I don't really get a different impression after reading this comment - "50% of queries show information from my index" could mean as little as reranking one result, and query distribution is known to be heavily biased towards the fat head.
Although, I just looked at one not-quite-head-but-not-quite-long-tail query ([modern family episode list]):
And the top 3 are identical, but the rest of the top 10 are about as different from Bing as Bing is from Google. Twiddles can be fairly powerful.
You obviously don't have to disclose everything you do in response to criticism - Google and Bing certainly don't. But that was my perception from your FAQ and posts, and certainly seems to be the perception of many other HN users as well.
My impression from the FAQ and your comments here is that you start with Yahoo! BOSS results, merge in other results that you suspect may be useful from your own crawl, filter out known spam pages, and possibly re-rank things afterwards according to whatever algorithms you have. Hence, "Bing with a bunch of twiddles on top." I don't really get a different impression after reading this comment - "50% of queries show information from my index" could mean as little as reranking one result, and query distribution is known to be heavily biased towards the fat head.
Although, I just looked at one not-quite-head-but-not-quite-long-tail query ([modern family episode list]):
http://duckduckgo.com/?q=modern+family+episode+list
http://www.bing.com/search?q=modern+family+episode+list
And the top 3 are identical, but the rest of the top 10 are about as different from Bing as Bing is from Google. Twiddles can be fairly powerful.
You obviously don't have to disclose everything you do in response to criticism - Google and Bing certainly don't. But that was my perception from your FAQ and posts, and certainly seems to be the perception of many other HN users as well.