I recently spoke with Gabriel and his view was that they're going to continue to outsource / proxy / aggregate unless they need to implement their own search. Right now it's not worth the investment apparently.

Yeah because Search is an actual hard problem and putting up a proxy like DDG is not. DDG will never have any real value beyond that.

IDK, if it ain't broke don't fix it.

Also the system in place for aggregation isn't just Nginx, it actually does things, like bangs.

Eliminating tracking of your searches is not valuable?

I said value beyond that. That meaning the privacy proxy.

That seems reasonable if the goal is privacy, right?

I mean, even if they were literally proxying to anonymized Google results, wouldn't that cover the privacy benefit?

It would make it hard to pretend that the DDG results were much better than those irrelevant Google results that more fanatical Googlephobes insist they get.