This is interesting. I was trying a search on duckduckgo and kept getting "website down" errors (and still am). I just now saw on the news that Bing is down, and apparently several search engines, including DDG, rely on Bing, so several other search engines are down as well.
I don't know much about search engine backbones, but I always thought DDG and similar "independent" search engines were completely self-contained. I'm just curious about the privacy implications of a "privacy" search engine using Bing (or maybe Google too) as their backbone.